Workforce Innovations

Feature

Ageless Ability: The Growing Older Workforce

By Sue LaForge, Project Director
The National Council on the Aging
SCSEP Workforce Training Center;
and NOVA Workforce Board Member

A dramatic change is taking place in today's workplace. It is a change with many implications both for workers and for the employers who need them. It involves a trend whose impact has evolved with the advent of advances in health care and lifestyle. It is the "Age Wave," a phrase coined by Dr. Ken Dychtwald, founder of Age Wave. Its arrival has not been proclaimed by the blowing of horns or spotlights scanning the horizon, but rather by the gradual extension of the average lifespan beginning around 1900 and continuing to the present.

At the turn of the last century, the percentage of people over 65 in the United States was a mere 4 percent; today it is almost 13 percent or 34 million people. Over the next decade, the number of Americans age 55 or over will increase by almost 30 percent. In the same period, the labor force of workers 55 or over is expected to grow by more than 10 million (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics).

While numbers surge on the side of the maturing labor force, at the other end of the age continuum, the labor force is growing smaller. Fewer younger people are entering the workforce, because there are simply fewer of them. The generation that followed the Baby Boomers, Generation X, comprises a considerably smaller segment of the U.S. population. A number of factors are involved in this trend, but the growing number of women in the workplace is certainly one of them. With both parents working, the trend has been for fewer children and smaller families.

With the decreasing pool of workers over time, many employers are concerned about meeting their workplace demands in the future. They are looking for ways to ensure there will be an adequate supply of workers to allow their businesses to thrive and prosper. In their pamphlet, "Protocol for Serving Older Workers," the Employment and Training Administration (ETA) notes: "To lessen the impact of the approaching labor shortfall, employers need to recognize the strengths of mature workers and increase training and hiring of this population."

More options must be given to maturing workers whose skills need to be updated and to ways of using older workers in retail, hospitality, child and elder care, finance, and education. Options for part-time as well as full-time work and job sharing will remain attractive to older workers who wish to remain productive, the ETA notes.

One of the Department of Labor's slogans in regard to older workers is "Age is an Asset. Experience, a Benefit." Robert Funk, founder, chairman of the board, and chief executive officer of Express Personnel Services, says, "Mature workers bring stability, loyalty and wisdom to today's workplace." There is value in hiring those who possess such traits.

Several local agencies focus their attention on the training and education needs of older workers who are low income. The Senior Community Service Employment Program (SCSEP), sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor, is offered through three Santa Clara County agencies: The National Council on the Aging (see sidebar story), Silicon Valley Council on Aging, and Self-Help for the Elderly, whose main office is in San Francisco.

SCSEP is primarily an on-the-job training program that provides community service to local nonprofit agencies in exchange for helping to upgrade job skills of those assigned to them. The trainees are paid minimum wage out of funds authorized under the Older Americans Act and administered by the Department of Labor. SCSEP offices welcome inquiries from local employers interested in the possibility of hiring older workers. For further information, please call (408) 280-7791.

The Workforce Investment system, for which NOVA is the regional organization, serves the entire range of workers including seniors. Proven People, operated under the auspices of NOVA and the City of Sunnyvale, provides job referral services to older workers from their offices at the Sunnyvale Senior Center (see related story).