How Reskilling Energizes a Multigenerational Workforce

BY Emily Nonko | September 09, 2021

At the Tokyo Olympics this summer, a team of specialists from the global tech company Atos provided end-to-end IT support and services, which included keeping score at events, running the jumbotrons, and designing mobile software so that attendees could see the day’s schedule at a glance. The huge undertaking required a dedicated team that was a striking example of diversity, representing 23 different ethnicities and nationalities, as well as an age range from 23 to 60.

This diverse makeup–including the generational mix–was not a fluke. “We really focus on all diversity dimensions,” said Denise Reed Lamoreaux, the global chief diversity officer for Atos. “We’re tracking specific metrics as it relates to the ages of our employees as well as the advancement of those people, according to the generations.”

Atos, which has about 105,000 employees across 71 countries, made a dedicated investment in its older employees after Lamoreaux came across a study that showed how Italy, Germany and Japan have the oldest workforces in the world. These are all countries where the company hires. “I knew I had to start paying attention to this equation,” she said. Years of work factoring age into the company’s diversity, equity and inclusion strategy resulted in a program called “Bridging the Generational Skills Gap,” which the company launched internally this May to provide educational opportunities for employees age 50 and up.

The aging workforce of other countries, and the urgency for international companies to respond, shows what’s ahead for the U.S. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that in 2028, one in four American workers will be age 55 or older–and nearly one in ten will be 65 and older.

At the same time, there's a growing need to reskill the American workforce as the nature of work evolves. The World Economic Forum’s latest Future of Jobs report notes that “the window of opportunity to reskill and upskill workers has become shorter in the newly constrained labor market” due to the pandemic; it also states “the public sector needs to provide stronger support for reskilling and upskilling for at-risk or displaced workers.”

Teaching new skills to an aging workforce is becoming more and more of a necessity–and seizing the opportunity only serves to benefit companies, Reed Lamoreaux believes. “It’s benefiting every employee to have these types of programs in place, so that there isn’t panic, worry or a failure to be able to continue the work when that workforce retires,” she said.

Debunking the Myths About Older Workers

When Heather Tinsley-Fix, a Senior Advisor at AARP, first started talking to companies about the importance of hiring and retaining older employees, “it was crickets a lot of the time,” she said. “No one was really speaking on this at HR conferences.” Organizations have been slow to adopt age as part of their diversity, equity and inclusion work. “There’s a real cognitive disconnect between how deeply embedded ageism is, on a person-to-person level, and the reality that when companies do hire older workers, there’s a lot of satisfaction around performance,” said Tinsley-Fix.

There are also persistent myths about older workers: that they want higher salaries for mid-level jobs; that it takes too much work, money or time to reskill them; and that they wouldn’t be interested in reskilling anyway.

In 2012, AARP launched its Employer Pledge Program as a way companies could affirm the value of experienced workers and commit to action plans for building age-inclusive workforces. The program has grown exponentially to include more than 1,000 employers, according to Tinsley-Fix, as companies increasingly recognize the realities of an aging workforce and tightening labor market.

The global economy is moving increasingly toward a skills-based workforce, according to Zara Ingilizian, head of consumer industries for the World Economic Forum. “Skills are the new currency in the labor market, not the resume or where you go to school,” she said. In a pilot report testing employee reskilling with Walmart and Unilever, “we found that skill gaps are filled faster, and with 70% greater efficiency, by taking a skills-first approach and using AI to identify gaps and provide individuals with targeted training,” she said. “It’s much more cost efficient to retrain a current employee than hire someone from the outside.”

The pilot report found that labor-analysis technology was highly effective in recognizing “hidden skills” employees might not realize they have–a promising tool to identify older workers with high potential for adaptation, Ingilizian noted. With proximate-skills data in hand, companies can develop fast, practical, and cost-efficient paths to supporting employees on the next phase of their careers. For employees who do need to go through reskilling, the pilot found that on average, “people could be reskilled for new roles in completely different functions in just six months’ time.”

A Reskilling Program in Action

Atos is engaged in reskilling with an eye toward its “tenured talent.” Lamoreaux began collecting data on the ages of the company employee base and broke it down by roles, departments, and locations. “We have about 21,000 people in our company over 50,” she said. With data in hand, she built company-wide awareness on reskilling opportunities and workplace ageism.

The company developed its program for Bridging the Generational Skills Gap specifically to address reskilling. It launched in May with a session designed for employees over 50 (though all are welcome to join) that broke down the statistics about workforce aging, the diversity importance of retaining older employees, the mentoring and affinity groups currently available, and the kind of skills and certifications the company is prioritizing.

The next session, in September, will help employees set goals about new courses, certifications and training, while providing them with study groups and “accountability buddies” to support them through the reskilling process. Atos looks for feedback along the way. “Employees share with me what they learned, how they’ve applied it, and the impact they’re seeing as a result,” Reed Lamoreaux said.

The goal is to develop an engaging, supportive and creative network to help older workers reskill, as well as transfer and share their expertise with younger employees. Both Reed Lamoreaux and Tinsley-Fix stress the importance of cross-generational mentoring and collaboration: “A lot of these soft skills developed over time and on the job tend to come with age,” Tinsley-Fix pointed out. “That’s where mentoring is really helpful.” Mentoring can also work the other way around, as a recent story in Insights by Stanford Business outlined, by setting up frameworks for younger employees to teach new skills to older workers.

Older Workers Bring a High Level of Engagement

It’s not enough to simply reskill older workers; companies have to provide other support to make workplaces more flexible and accommodating. Ruth Finkelstein, an expert on aging, spearheaded the Age Smart Employer program in 2013 with an initial focus on labor shortages and reskilling and retraining in those fields. But she realized “there was not enough work happening with employers in recruiting, hiring, retaining and valuing older workers.”

Age Smart Employer, a program of Columbia University’s school of public health, developed strategies for companies to do so, which include offering flexible and part-time work, a commitment to on-the-job training for people at all career stages, and intentional recruitment among older communities.

As Finkelstein and others point out, an age-diverse workplace leads to better performance and healthier workplaces. According to a study by AARP and Aon Hewitt, employees age 50 and over are among the most engaged age cohort across all generations, with an emotional and intellectual involvement that motivates them to do their best work and contribute to an organization’s success. It makes sense to support those employees within a company, even as the labor market demands shifting skill sets.

“You have to start unpacking all your stereotypes about people,” Finkelstein said. “Diverse workplaces are innovative, seize opportunities, and are entrepreneurial in their outlook–because they bring different perspectives to the same problem.”

Editor's note: This is the first story in a three-part series. From Day One thanks our partner in producing this series, AARP.

Emily Nonko is a Brooklyn, NY-based reporter who writes about real estate, architecture, urbanism and design. Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York magazine, Curbed and other publications.

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