More years of life, more years of work: active ageing challenges and businesses age management practices

Pietro Checcucci, ISFOL
Alessandra De Rose, Sapienza Università di Roma
Filomena Racioppi, Sapienza Università di Roma

It is widely accepted that population aging has not to be dealt only as a challenge for the welfare systems, but also as a source of opportunities. Implications of working population aging can be detected both at individual and at business level. At individual level, an expected longer life will result in a prolonged working life, with more and differentiated career paths; a more satisfying quality of life could be achieved with a better distribution of working time throughout the life course. Businesses, in turn, could seize the opportunity of the increased availability of workforce which is, on average, older but also highly motivated. Many initiatives have been proposed at European level aimed to improve an active ageing, including the enhancement of the working conditions for a growing numbers of older people in Europe, encourage healthy ageing and strengthen solidarity and cooperation between generations. At business level this process leads to the implementation of a system of strategies called “Age Management” aimed at a better use of the experience and abilities of older generations of workers; rethink the forms of work organization; review the approaches used in the process of recruitment. A number of practices are on the table: leading the competence transfer between generations, monitoring and supporting the time and procedures of retirement, exchanging knowledge between youngest and oldest workers (reverse mentoring) and other good practices such as life-long learning, and the monitoring of workers’ health with periodical medical checkups. The aim of this paper is to reflect on the implications of demographic aging on Italian businesses workforce and its management. We address the topic by illustrating the results of two recent surveys, conducted on a sample of large and small-medium enterprises respectively, held in 2013 by ISFOL (the Italian Institute for the Development of Vocational Training of Workers).