Description:

Older workers have substantive portfolios of knowledge and experiences gained from their work practice. Often, much of this knowledge and experience is lost when older employees leave the workplace, thereby representing a significant loss to the company and colleagues. Yet, it is very difficult to make older workers' implicit knowledge explicit in order for younger and less experienced employees to learn from it. Moreover, companies often ignore the potential that can result from sharing these workers' experiences and knowledge and do not have mechanisms in place to facilitate their employees' continuity of learning and knowledge transfer across generations of workers. Such procedures would benefit the company and its staff members, as well as recognising the value of older employees' contributions to the work place. Based on empirical research from different European research projects, the German contribution will present some examples of strategies that aim at facilitating knowledge transfer and workplace learning between different generations of workers through, for example, knowledge management, expert networks, counselling and mentoring systems, expert-novice learning, etc. and investigate the role that such mechanisms can play for the societal and labour market integration of older employees.

Sustaining Older Workers’ Competence. Case Study Germany

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