Managing older talents in the context of aging society

Abstract

Talents are more important than ever for the successful performance of organizations. The workforce is aging rapidly, and this trend creates both additional challenges for the companies and opportunities for the new directions in the management research. In the context of aging society, there is a lack of studies that analyze career development of older workers and especially older talents. In order to manage talented older employees, companies must reveal and fulfil their expectations and thus further develop their careers. To do so, older talents in later life have the following options: career mobility, workplace mentorship, volunteering, or older entrepreneurship. In order to find what practices are being taken by companies of various business industries in Lithuania to manage older talents, qualitative research strategy was employed. As the main method for the data collection, semi-structured in-depth interviews were adopted. The findings revealed, the majority of the companies support the idea that all their employees are talents, without indicating one particular age group, e.g. older workers. The respondents indicated the most valuable benefits given by the older talents as well as the main challenges that older talents impose in the organization. Older talents have some specific needs in comparison with younger talents, especially in training (which denies one of stereotypes that older workers can't be trained), as well as the need to contribute into the success of the company) and working conditions (e.g. flexibility). When evaluating the practices that are applied specifically to older talents, the most commonly mentioned among the respondents were various mentorship programs.

Social attitudes towards professional work of the 55+ generation. Comparative analysis of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary

“…This type of inclusion benefits the labor market through the growth in the number of experienced employees. These employees have the potential for specialist knowledge and competences (Vieser et al, 2016;Van Tienoven et al, 2020;Vilčiauskaitė et al, 2020;Egdell et al, 2021). They also have emotional and social capital, which they can pass on to the younger generation of employees (Cucina et al, 2018;Siemieńska 2021).…”

“…This is particularly important in the face of an aging population and shortages in the labor market. Empirical research on economic activity conducted in this age group has shown that employees working in this age category relatively more often occupy specialist and managerial positions (Visser et al, 2016;Vilčiauskaitė et al, 2020). The level of education is a factor that strongly modifies the frequency of performing work in the 55+ group.…”

“…The level of education is a factor that strongly modifies the frequency of performing work in the 55+ group. The higher the education confirmed by a certificate or diploma is, the higher is the level of the professional activity rate (Szukalski, 2008;Visser et al, 2016;Vilčiauskaitė et al, 2020).…”

Change of productivity loss due to presenteeism among the ageing workforce: Role of work support, workplace discrimination, and the work‐nonwork interface

“…Thus, a study of how to conserve and maintain the productivity of the ageing workforce would be valuable. Definitions of ageing workforce are not unified; some studies recognise workers age 40 and older as constituting the ageing workforce (Vilčiauskaitė et al., 2020), others define them as older than 45 or 48 (Fekedulegn et al., 2019; Matthews et al., 2010) or 50 (Chou & Choi, 2011; Pindek & Segel‐Karpas, 2021; Quach, 2018). Like other projects based on the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), we defined the ageing workforce as comprising individuals older than 50 (Smith et al., 2017).…”