New thinking on older staff

The coalition government has proposed changes to the State Pension Age (SPA) - set to increase to 66 by 2020 - and employment laws affecting retirement, abolishing the default retirement age at 65. Such changes, along with the ageing UK population, will force process companies to come up with strategies that retain and make best use of the skills of their most experienced workers.

Recruitment policies in the process sector have long focused on attracting younger workers, while early retirement is another industry norm.

There is now, therefore, a pressing need for employers to develop a clear understanding of what employment for older workers means for their companies, as well as for the wider process engineering sector.

While some companies have already developed strategies to adapt to demographic change - BASF’s Generations@Work initiative is a good example - most employers have yet to even get to the drawing board.

Official figures show that, by 2020, almost a third of the UK workforce will be over the age of 50. At the same time, the number of workers under 35 is falling, with the fastest decrease among the 18-24 age groups.

Of the UK’s 2.7 million manufacturing workforce, 20-30% is due to retire in the next 10 years; 30% of manufacturing workers are already between 50 and SPA, while retention rates of pensionable workers compare badly with other sectors. Only 3.5% of the manufacturing workforce is over 65, compared with almost 7% in health and 5.4% in the retail sector.

Despite increasing recognition of the value of older workers in a time of skills shortages, relatively few employers have actively started to pursue policies to attract and motivate older workers, notes Sam Mercer, engagement manager at Extending Working Lives (EWL) - a government-backed initiative to encourage the recruitment and retention of older workers. “More effort needs to be made to identify and tackle barriers to the employment of older workers,” she said. “Manufacturing environments are diverse; inevitably there are different issues in different sectors. Common concerns include the physically demanding nature of many jobs, particularly the long shifts.”

Alongside perceived challenges associated with offering flexible working within a shift system are issues concerning rapidly changing technology in the sector, which means skills become obsolete quickly. “Negative images of older workers need to be tackled, along with myths over their ability to perform,” said Mercer.

Increasing options for flexible working is a good place to start, the EWL manager suggested. The manufacturing sector has a higher-than-average proportion of full-time workers (91.1%), but retention rates of older workers (and women) could be significantly extended by making options to work more flexibly available, Mercer said.

“Investing in training and motivating employees to keep their skills up-to-date has to be another area for industry focus,” she added.

Another issue concerns the fact that while larger employers may have capacity to innovate and redeploy older workers, most manufacturing businesses are small organisations: 93% employ fewer than 50 people.

“Across industry we need to look at ways to support smaller employers in managing workforce planning, and in developing solutions in working practices to support the extension of working lives,” concluded Mercer.