Page 62 - increasing-the-value-of-age-guidance-in-employers-age-management-strategies

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

The growing emphasis on lifelong learning since the mid-1990s implied a
stronger focus on the link between the modalities of adult learning in different
areas of social activity throughout the life courses of adults. While formal
education systems are still very much focused on initial education and training,
the development of lifelong learning systems faces the challenge of linking a
variety of formal as well as non-formal and informal areas of adult learning.
As people get older and more experienced, acquiring knowledge, skills and
informed perspectives, they also increase their potential: as active contributors to
the development of organisations, to the knowledge flow between generations of
workers, as mediators in innovation processes, and as participants in
management decisions. The acquired experience is also a potential platform for
workers to progress to different development stages in their careers, where they
can have new responsibilities and roles.
To amass this potential, the experience of people needs to be visible and
translated into a language which relates to the skills needs of organisations and
the qualification systems enforced by law or sector conventions. Once the
relevant experience of workers is identified in this way, and both organisations
and workers themselves become aware of it, new possibilities of career
development and job placement can be opened.
Guidance plays a large role in this process. It should precede it, by making
an initial assessment people’s experiences and advising validation. During
validation, it should help by identifying skills, clarifying needs and potential
development paths, and after validation by helping people plan the next steps in
their careers.
In the concrete case of older workers, guidance needs to be inserted in their
work context, given that, these workers will seldom autonomously seek
counselling. Further it needs to be provided in a way in which it is felt as a
voluntary, ethical process, rather than an imposition of management or a
stigmatising process (tagging the worker as useless or in deficit of skills and
personal traits).
Validation procedures have now become a common issue in the national
systems since Member States agreed the common European principles for
validation of non-formal and informal learning in 2004. They were further
developed in the European guidelines in 2008 in the context of underpinning the
European qualification framework.
Despite the emergence in recent years of agreed EU frameworks for
qualifications and competences, information collected at country level
demonstrates that the development and practices of RPL in Member States have

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