The international market and ever-changing workforce have produced the necessity for employers to employ human resources practices that can facilitate their employees as their major competitive advantage. In fact, the present scenario emphasizes the growing demand for successful, innovative recruitment and retention initiatives. Employers deploy different techniques to attract and recruit best talent. In this extremely competitive market aged workforce is an asset of experience and is fruitful in decision making for an organization. On the other side of the picture there are some limitations; aged human resource may have some inadequacy with modern and young trends and techniques, and they need trainings to develop themselves. In this study I have discussed role retirees in an organization and challenges encountered to conduct their training.
Retirees as Worker: Benefits and Limitations
In the past many employers have often overlooked older workers, assuming that they are likely to be less productive and more difficult to manage compared to younger workers. However retirees commonly have following advantage for an employer.
Experience
Aged workers have seen success, failures and learned a lot from their mistakes. Their relations, links and goodwill, with colleagues, customers and suppliers, have built in years, and are hard and pricey to replace.
Work Time and Cost Flexibility
Many retirees who are approaching the retirement age, they are willing to step by step reduce their working hours before completely retiring. Phased retirement offer an employer low cost skilled worker and it also allow an aged worker to extend his working life.
Reliability
Retirees have very low rate to change jobs than younger and they often have a stronger loyalty to the employer. Most likely younger worker being more enthusiastic look for upper level posts, but aged work already enjoying senior posts does not prefer to change jobs.
Retirees Training
Challenges in Retirees Training
Regardless of age, every person needs training to keep up to date due to ever advancing science and skills of a work. But retirees are less likely than younger co-workers to take part in training, either because they are not offered opportunities or are not encouraged to take part (McNair 2010). There can be several reasons for this fact, may be they think that they have learned a lot and lost the wish to learn more, maybe they think that their left work life is very short and there is no benefit of training, or maybe they have negative experiences from previous trainings.
Conclusion
Individual wishes about extending work life are changing for many different reasons, and the notion of retirement is also changing. Our generation has longer lives and getting retired early means spending much longer time in retirement than earlier generations. Most of the people working in their fifties and sixties, want likely to delay retirement, by staying in work longer, but working on a more flexible basis, perhaps working part-time, freelance or self-employed. Such flexible type jobs are increasing and retirees have a variety of choices about extending their working live. It is very essential for retirees to motivate themselves to adopt according to new trends and involve themselves in available training opportunities. Retirees represent intellectual assets which are the new source of organizational capital, and the employer could increase them only through training, development and motivation. The prosperity of organizations explicitly depends on the intellectual capacity of their employees and their ability to change and adjust to the dynamic business environment. Retirees are an asset and intellectual capacity for their employers; they can contribute through their priceless experience for an organization’s success.
References
Allen, R. (2005, Fall). Competitive career managment practices. Insights.
CIPD. (2012). Managing a healthy ageing workforce:A national business imperative. London, UK: CIPD. Retrieved from cipd.co.uk/publicpolicy
