Workers in the Public Sector Workforce: The Older Worker

Workers in the Public Sector Workforce : The Older Worker

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Workers in the Public Sector Workforce : The Older Worker

Introduction

Like the rest of the American population , the American workforce is aging (Beatty and Visser , 2004 . One person , born between 1943 and 1960 (post World War II generation generally referred to as "baby boomer 's or "boomers ) will turn , or has turned fifty years old every eight seconds in this first decade of the twenty-first century (Hedge et al 2005 . It was estimated that by 2008

over seventeen million of the people in the United States would be between the ages of forty-five and sixty (Greenberg , 2007 . When the "baby boomers " begin to reach sixty-five years of age , they will comprise the largest group of aged people ever to have worked in the United States at one time (Beatty and Visser , 2004 . Some statisticians predict that by the year 2020 the United States could face the prospect of a shrinking workforce due to lower birthrates and "baby boomer " workers retiring (Hedge et al 2005 . According to Beatty and Visser (2004 , by the year 2050 , the cumulative growth of people , age eighty-five and older will rise over 400

All of these statistics represent a dramatic change in the age related demographics of the nation , and by default , a dramatic change in the demographic make-up of the American workforce . It is expected that by the year , 2008 American workers over the age of fifty-five will grow by 36 .8 and the number of workers between the ages of fifty-five and sixty-four will increase by 7 .3 million workers (Montenegro , Fisher Remez , 2002 . An AARP survey of older workers found that although financial need was a primary reason workers were not retiring , older persons also continued working because they enjoyed working , they wanted to continue to be productive and to help others , and working helped them to feel useful (Montenegro , Fisher Remez , 2002 . These findings suggest that older workers and the organizations that employ them are entering a new era

Aging Workforce Challenges : Literature Review

The literature that specifically examines the s of "older workers concurrently is fairly brief . With the "Impending Crisis " and its labor shortage described by Herman et al (2003 ) occurring in this decade , the research on just exactly what is happening with older workers and the area of career development would be drawn to the forefront . Such is not the case . Rocco , Stein , and Lee (2003 ) conducted an exploratory examination of the literature on age and HRD policy development that showed that only 10 of the articles that they found on the subject included career development and older workers since 1980 . Several emergent trends were identified in their study . There is considerable variation in the literature in the concept of the older worker . The term older worker included workers from 40 years to 75 years of age . There is a trend to move the definition of who is an older worker from chronological age to a...