Working Longer: New Strategies for Managing, Training, and Retaining Older Employees

Abstract

This scholarly book is part of a series that addresses issues and theories about adult learning. The authors are experienced, credentialed professionals involved in the education, training, and management of adult employees. This book and series are not specific to nursing and health care, but the subject matter is of importance to nurses. The book is an excellent resource for nurses who are interested in learning about the application of theory and research as it applies to older employees. The purpose of the series will be familiar to nurses, as it seeks to link theory and research to practice. The authors present original research that examines managing, training, and retaining older workers. The significance of this work is that it addresses the ways in which older workers can be encouraged to either return to employment after retirement or how employers can retain and train older employees. That the nursing workforce is aging is common knowledge to those in practice, and the authors describe nursing as one industry that is already beginning to feel the impact of an older workforce. According to the data presented in the book, by the year 2010, approximately 40% of all working RNs will be older than 50 years of age. The authors—citing sources such as the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, the Job Training Partnership Act, and the Older Americans Act—consider anyone over the age of 55 to be an “older” worker. The book is organized in three major parts. Chapters 1 to 3 define adult workers and describe the issues surrounding working longer (ie, past the traditional retirement age). These three chapters present the ways in which workplaces can be re designed to accommodate the unique needs of older employees. Chapter 3 focuses on training and educating older workers and serves as an introduction to the second part of the book, which discusses learning and education among older workers. This is of particular interest to nurses as the health care work environment becomes more technologically advanced and many nurses find themselves having to become computer savvy and manage more complicated equipment. The authors note that technology is one area in which older employees are thought to be behind their younger counterparts. Research has failed to support this, however. In fact, the authors cite a study by SeniorNet that found that 76% of older workers taught themselves how to use

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 17 citations exist upstream.