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Increasing the value of age: guidance in employers’ age management strategies

CHAPTER 8.

Challenges and key messages

This chapter details the main conclusions of the study and provides
recommendations derived from them.
The conclusions are structured according to the main challenges to the
development of guidance in active age management in the workplace, at system
and at organisation level. Discussion on the challenges addresses the four
European policy priorities: development of career management skills, access to
guidance, quality provision, and cooperation between stakeholders.
Discussion of the challenges, underpinned by the outcomes of the study, will
help identify key messages – proposals or recommendations – to develop further
the conditions for effective guidance service delivery for older workers.
These messages apply to the groups and stakeholders playing a role in
policy-making and consecutive development and implementation processes.
Stakeholders include politicians, ministries, policy-makers, public agencies and
public providers, regional and local authorities, social partners, business
enterprises, human resources staff, as well as older workers themselves.
Section 8.2 deals with the challenges identified; Section 8.3 provides some
key messages for policy-makers.

8.1. Main challenges identified

Challenge 1
Career development services for employed older workers are scarce and weakly
supported by guidance tools. Despite the growing policy attention paid to active
ageing and the increasing participation figures across countries, older workers
still face challenges to remaining employed longer. Career support, publicly
provided through guidance and counselling, mainly targets youth entering the
labour market or in initial career stages. Public employment services are opening
up their offer (such as guidance, counselling, training, and placements) to the
employed, and increasingly addressing older workers. Nevertheless, some first
evaluation studies show mixed results: these services are rarely used by
employed workers and employment services also have a limited amount of time
to assist in the specific needs of this target group. The current trend seems to be
the implementation of self-service (mainly information) online tools.

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