AHRI Pulse Survey: Older Workers
The survey was conducted online in November and December 2014 and communicated by email to a sample of members of the Australian Human Resources Institute. A total of 1931 respondents completed the survey. Responses were treated anonymously.
Key Findings
Respondents identified the main benefits of recruiting older workers as the experience they bring, the professional knowledge they have acquired, and their reliability.
Respondents identified the main obstacles to recruiting older workers as the physical demands of the job, poor technology skills, and the fact that many older workers don’t apply for vacancies
A majority of respondents believe older workers are more loyal, reliable, aware, committed and have better levels of attendance than younger workers. They also believe, however, that younger workers have more energy, career ambition, technology skills, creativity and are more physically capable than older workers.
Retirement, redundancy, illness and injury are identified by respondents as the most common reasons why older workers leave the workplace.
More than half of the sample (56%) say their workplace does not survey the workforce to gain information about future work intentions.
Around three quarters (77%) of respondents say line managers in their workplace are not trained in ways to manage different generations.
Slightly more than half the sample group (53%) say age-related bias seldom or never occurs in their workplace.
Almost four out of ten respondents (38%) would classify a worker as old if the worker was between the ages of 50-55 (13%) or 56-60 (25%)
Only 3% of respondents report that their workplace has ever considered menopause as a HR issue.
Fewer than 3% of respondents say their workplace uses mature age specific job boards to advertise vacancies.
Of those that say age-related bias does occur in their workplace, 64% say it affects both older and younger workers.
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Utpala Menon
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0497 588 042