Extending working lives

Overview

Extending working lives and raising the employment rate of older workers, aided by lifelong learning, are key responses to the demographic and welfare challenges of an ageing workforce.

This research field identified innovative, effective, sustainable and transferable private and public-sector strategies that encourage and enable older workers to

1. stay longer in employment (pre and post-retirement age)

2. intensify lifelong (vocational) learning in the later stages of their working lives.

Our activities drew on international best practice to integrate measures for extending working lives that enhance the quality of work and well-being of workers involved.

The research field ‘Extending working lives’ proceeded in five steps. Firstly, a conceptual framework was designed to develop standards for identifying appropriate strategies. Following, the current ‘state of the art’ of approaches at organisational/employer level and at the level of national policy and stakeholder were mapped. In the third step, motivations for and attitudes towards extended working lives were identified. This refers to older workers themselves as well as organisations/companies and national policies and stakeholders.

Related to and based on this, structural drivers of and barriers to innovation were identified. This also refers to older workers, organisations /companies, as well as social partners (trade unions, employer organisations) and institutional incentives and disincentives such as national employment/pension policies, and education and fiscal systems.

In the fifth step, based on previous steps innovative scenarios were developed for national and EU-level policy recommendations. Central were scenarios linking economic aspects with societal needs (active citizenship); life-course oriented working time patterns and new combinations of formal and informal work, and other social initiatives.

See the findings for this research field

The Innovations section contains details of social innovations related to this research field. They were collected as part of an overarching task exploring the potential for social innovation to support active and healthy ageing undertaken as part of the ‘Active and healthy ageing as an asset’ research field.