Employee age and voluntary development activity

It is known that older workers undertake less formal training than younger ones, but little information is available about age‐patterns in voluntary development activities undertaken in an employee’s own time. In a study of 1798 manufacturing workers, age and ten other factors were examined in relation to four types of activity: participation in a tuition refund scheme, learning in an employee development programme, attendance at an employee development centre, and use of a personal development record. Significant age‐ differences were found, and key influential factors were identified as older workers’ lower educational qualifications (representing both cognitive and affective differences) and their more limited learning motivation (linked to lower learning confidence and greater perceived time constraints). However, older individuals who had previously undertaken each form of development were as positive about that previous activity as were younger participants. Possible interventions to increase voluntary development at older ages include rewards for participation, enhancement of basic skills, pretraining in appropriate learning strategies, sequential exposure to graded learning demands, and steps to change organisational stereotypes of older staff.