Page 46 - increasing-the-value-of-age-guidance-in-employers-age-management-strategies

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

Companies have various reasons to perform competence assessment:
defining recruitment criteria, career development of staff, planning the
transmission of knowledge and the replacement of older staff. Competence
assessment is sometimes required for company quality assurance of
management systems/standards, in restructuring and organisational change. At
other times it may be mandatory, according to national labour law.
This Cedefop study also highlights that not all company segments or groups
of employees are assessed to the same degree; activities are mostly focused on
managers and high qualified technicians and engineers. The report does not
address the specific situation of older workers.
One other conclusion of the study is that companies rarely use common
methodologies or presentation formats, or share terminology for referencing
knowledge, skills, and competences. Also, the connection between private and
public validation frameworks is limited. For both these reasons, validation
systems across firms tend to be either opaque or not very compatible, limiting the
mobility of employees between enterprises.

3.3.5. Examples from countries studied
Given the lack of overarching statistics on guidance and active age management
in the workplace, this study gathered additional information at national level.
Generally, information on country level echoes lack of systematic quantitative
data collection on this topic, although some studies were referred to at national
level.
Generally, these studies confirm the low awareness of age management
issues within companies across Europe. Recent research, for example on human
resources strategies in companies in the Czech Republic, shows that only 13% of
Czech employers have included efforts to retain older employees in their strategic
plans.
In the UK, a survey of human resources professionals showed that only a
quarter of organisations had a strategy for career development for all staff, and
only a third felt that senior management was committed to career management
activities. Only some of the organisations reporting a strategy provide some type
of guidance to their staff.
Low awareness of the relevance of age management and the role of
guidance starts partly with stereotypical perceptions of older workers. In Sweden,
for example, a recent survey shows that approximately 25% of union
representatives and 15% of employers believe that older people should retire
earlier to make way for younger people (Swedish Government, 2013). Many older

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