aging, in vocational psychology dictionary

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Dictionary of Vocational Psychology

Aging

Aging presents a number of difficulties for workers. There are fewer senior than junior level positions, and as individuals age they may fail to advance into such positions within organizations, and this may lead to feelings of failing to achieve earlier career ambitions. Mergers and acquisitionss, which tend to consolidate senior leadership and think the ranks of superfluous senior level positions in the new organization, hit older workers particularly hard.

The skills and knowledge that older workers may have acquired over their years of work may not be in as high demand as those of younger workers, particularly in industries enjoying rapid technological or competitive change. Although it is a truism that all workers need to acquire new skills in order to remain competitive, it is also true that a history of certain skills may in itself decrease the likelihood of the organization investing in certain new (and needed) skills in older workers; the organization may even correctly anticipate that the return on such investment may be greater with younger than with older workers, given the anticipated worklife longevity of the older worker.

Cognitive changes associated with aging may also present difficulties both for older workers and their employers. For example, even as crystallized abilities (previously acquired skills and knowledge) continue to increase over the span of the adult worklife, fluid abilities do not, and typically peak in the third decade of life (age 20-29) and thereafter begin a long period of relative decline. Because fluid abilities may be important in many work-related tasks, particularly those that depend on the speedy solution of complex problems that draw heavily on limited cognitive capacity, employers may have some reason to be concerned with the ability of older workers to meet the cognitive challenges of particular jobs that depend largely on fluid abilities.

In practice, organizations tend to allocate fluid ability intensive roles to younger workers, while reserving roles for older workers that may be performed best through accumulated crystallized abilities. In addition, organizations (like the classic dotcoms of the late 1990s, emphasizing flat organizational design) that employ primarily younger workers tended to focus on problems amenable to solution through strong fluid abilities, while organizations (like the classic large bureaucratic, many-layered corporation) that employ large numbers of older workers have tended to focus on problems emenable to efficient solution through institutional knowledge and routinized skills.

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