Research activities

Task 1: Building a conceptual framework

This task developed the work package’s conceptual framework and standards for identifying innovative, effective, sustainable and transferable strategies in age-related employment and lifelong learning. The typology focused on connecting and integrating approaches that help to overcome known limitations of individual initiatives. Employer and employee involvement ensures a user-oriented focus and user-oriented standards with a view to achieving greatest practical relevance and impact.

Methods: literature review, policy and stakeholder engagement, using expert-interviews as well as stakeholder focus groups (older workers/learners, policymakers, employer organisations, other experts).

Task 2: Mapping the current ‘state of the art’.

Based on the above typology, Task 2 prepared an overview of the state of the art of current innovative, successful and sustainable approaches to working and learning longer in different welfare regimes in the EU and outside. The task focused on:

The organisational/employer level

Patterns of (integrated) best practices. Focused on flexible working time patterns (around pension age), life course-oriented personnel policy measures, especially in SMEs.

The level of national policy and stakeholders (including social partners)

Pathways out of paid work into retirement; their institutionalised settings, health and disability, employment and lifelong learning policies. Focused on country policies (eg Germany’s retirement at 67, Finish program for older workers), their impact on employment and lifelong learning programs (eg PL).

Also focused on innovative strategies reconciling older age/third-age working with private (eg family, ‘second careers’) and societal needs (eg civic engagement, long-term working time accounts in Germany, Levensverloopsregeling in the NL).

Methods: literature review, secondary analysis of workplace/employer surveys (Operational Objective 7), review of policy and other stakeholder documents, in-depth business/SME studies in selected EU countries, benchmarking EU-wide best practice.

Task 3: Identifying and assessing motivations for and attitudes towards extended working lives

This task investigated motives, needs and norms affecting current and anticipated future changes in the labour market participation of older workers and the latter’s accommodation in the workplace, taking into account national/regional diversity. It focused on the drivers of norms and values affecting employment of older workers as well as:

Older workers

Motives, needs and prerequisites for working and learning longer, impediments and barriers, and how these may be changed. Focused on:

1. Family structures and relationships, caring obligations and social support, their impact on employability.

2. Older workers’ attitudes towards combining work and social/civic engagement, especially beyond the ‘official’ retirement age.

Organisations

Changes in the world of work and their impact on employer perceptions of older people’s ability to work, their general employability and productivity; images of older workers and their reality.

National policies and stakeholders

Political/legal, social and economic drivers of paradigm shifts in retirement, employment and lifelong learning policy. Concerns for intergenerational justice.

Methods: literature review, secondary analysing of social, employee and employer surveys (Operational Objective 7), continued in-depth business case studies commenced under Task 2, expert, stakeholder and policymaker interviews, focus groups with older workers and retired people.

Task 4: Identifying and assessing structural drivers of and barriers to innovation

This task examined structural drivers of and barriers to innovative, sustainable strategies for extended working lives, lifelong learning in later working life and accommodating older workers in the workplace. Working with older workers and learners, it explored how to overcome barriers and integrate measures for greater effectiveness. It focused on:

Older workers

Individual, household, structural and political factors, faced, in particular, by low skilled workers, workers with disabilities, women, migrant workers, the unemployed.

Organisational drivers/barriers

Commercial and experiential drivers and barriers and relevant differentiations (eg sector, production-regimes, company size, business cycles, management styles, ownership), age-discriminating/-friendly culture, employer/management-employee relationships.

Social partners

Collective bargaining processes, trade union presence and influence.

Institutional incentives and disincentives

National employment policies, further education policy, retirement and pension policies (including taxation, earning ceilings for work after retirement).

Methods: stakeholder (older worker) interviews, literature review, extension of in-depth business case studies exploring managerial, organisational, shop-floor best practice.

Task 5: Building innovative scenarios

This task integrated the findings from Tasks 2–4 into highly innovative, sustainable scenarios for extending working lives, raising older workers’ employment rates and intensifying lifelong learning in later working life. The scenarios informed national and EU-level policy recommendations, scoping integrated social and technical innovations.

Central are 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 (both individual and civic/volunteering).

Methods: reflection of research results, expert interviews, active engagement of stakeholders and end-users.