Maturing Workforce A View from the UK

I recently attended a dinner sponsored by the IBM Human Capital Management practice in the UK. In coversations with twelve Chief Human Resources Officers who were discussing the topic of the Maturing Workforce, a number of important themes became clear: Choice is an important component for employees as they approach retirement age. Some will choose to work, others will choose to do different kinds of work, while others will opt to exit the workforce. Where organizations need to focus is providing employees options, that, at the same time, are cost effective and relevant for the organizations themselves. Training was a subject raised by several individuals. Organizations have to get past a mindset that firms are less likely to obtain a return on investment on older workers, either because older workers don't want to learn or that their learnings can not be applied over a long enough time horizon. For firms to retain productive workers, training can help improve skills levels and make workers feel that the firm still finds their capabilities valuable - an important retention tool. This point was strongly emphasized by Dr. Sarah Harper, the Director of the Oxford Institute of Aging at the Universtiy of Oxford (http://www.ageing.ox.ac.uk) Many firms still do not have the analytic capabilties to determine which key positions they are most risk for losing, and the associated risks attached to losing individuals within those positions.

-- Eric Lesser, Associate Partner, IBM Institute for Business Value 

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[resveratrol]

HEALTH brings back sounds of the Cretaceous with their single“ Triceratops” from their self- titled debut long player. The LA quartet dips into the primordial soup, crafting sonic assaults of rumbling guitar lines, massive electronically produced locust- like buzzes, shrieks, thundering drums, squalls of noise, crashing symbols, along with Cro- Magnon chants and screams (yeah, I know part this doesn’ t jive with the prehistoric timeline). The Saul Levitz directed video for“ Triceratops” shows band members...

[FreeStoring]

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[Paula Patinella]

There was an interesting article in today's WSJ about the aging brian and how training might help keep your brain young!

Old Brains Don't Work
That Badly After All,
Especially Trained Ones
March 3, 2006; Page B1
Maybe I'm guilty of wishful thinking, but more and more research seems to be pointing to a rare bit of good news about aging: Old brains have gotten a bum rap.
Yes, some of the downbeat findings have stood the test of time. Older brains do process information more slowly, probably starting in middle age. As a result, they take a bit longer to make decisions or judgments, and to assimilate complex information.
Older brains are less nimble, too, taking longer to switch from one task to another. Since in "multitasking" you are actually switching among tasks -- from driving to chatting to checking the tailgater -- in split-second jumps, loss of agility means old brains don't handle simultaneous tasks as well.
But as scientists reassess old results, even findings that have achieved iconic status are being questioned. For one thing, neurons don't abandon ship. "It used to be thought that normal cognitive decline occurred because of loss of neurons throughout the brain," says Marilyn Albert of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. But new techniques show that most regions hold on to their neurons (and even 70-year-olds produce new neurons), with little to no loss in the hippocampus, where memories form, or the frontal cortex, site of such executive functions as planning and judgment.
One problem with studies comparing old and young brains is that old brains are different not only because they have been around longer. The lives their owners lead are different. The elderly tend to have fewer new experiences, be less physically active and socially engaged, and live in less complex environments. All of these impair the production of new neurons and the maintenance of neural circuitry.
"The trouble with retirement is, there are not a lot of social or intellectual demands," says research psychologist Denise Park of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "Life becomes routinized," a recipe for cognitive decline. Some of the decline attributed to aging may therefore reflect not aging per se but factors much more within people's control.
Such as? Consider a recent study of short-term memory. Scientists had two groups of volunteers, one 19 years old to 30 and the other 60 to 77, look at pictures of faces and of the outdoors. Soon after, the volunteers saw more pictures and decided if they had seen them before.
The younger brains, as a group, had better recall. More telling, their activity differed. Shown a face, there was higher activity in the "face-seeing" area and little in the "place" area. Shown a scene, the pattern of high and low activity switched. Most of the older brains, though, showed activity in both regions when trying to recall either a face or a scene, suggesting difficulty repressing distractions.
"It suggests they were not filtering out irrelevant information," says neurologist Adam Gazzaley of the University of California, San Francisco, who led the 2005 study, published in Nature Neuroscience.
But one-third of the older volunteers did just as well as the younger adults and, intriguingly, showed the same pattern of focused brain activity. Apparently, trouble inhibiting irrelevant information and blocking distractions, which impairs short-term memory and reasoning, is not as inevitable as had been thought.
What makes these older brains look young? One possibility is training. Attention and focus are top-down functions, in that the prefrontal cortex orders regions that see or hear to pay attention to important stuff and ignore the rest. Top-down activity seems to be among the most trainable mental functions.
A basic change the brain undergoes with age may also be reversible with training. Older brains often use both the left and right half of a region for something young brains do with only one side. Sometimes that improves performance. Older adults who activate both the left and right prefrontal regions, which are involved in memory, have pretty good short-term memory, says Illinois' Kirk Erickson. The reason may be that two-sided activation of the prefrontal regions compensates for deficits in the hippocampus. In contrast, on tasks such as judgment, decision-making, concentration and multitasking, two-sided activation seems to impair performance, as if the brain is too scattered.
Yet in a study published online last month in Neurobiology of Aging, Dr. Erickson and Illinois' Arthur Kramer found that old brains can be trained to act like young ones.
The scientists had volunteers watch a computer screen and press a button when certain targets appeared. That required focus and decision-making. At first, the brains of older adults (age 55 to 80) had the characteristic two-sided activation and made more mistakes than young brains. But after five hours of practicing and receiving feedback, the older brains got better -- and showed one-sided activity, like the young.
"This suggests that the brains of older adults remain relatively flexible, able to alter brain circuits in response to training," says Dr. Erickson.
Yes, brains age. But their ability to remake themselves and respond to training is undeniable.
• You can email me at sciencejournal@wsj.com.

[Nancy Frost]

As the government continues to increase the age limit for receiving full social security benefits, one might guess that the preferred retirement age might follow suit. One approach might be to match mentors to their young ounterparts to create a synergy of knowledge across the generations.

[Paula Briki]

An important aspect of 'finding' the right skills is making sure employees have the best information about which skills are valued and how they can be put to best use through in-demand job roles. The UpSkilling work we have been doing for the past year and a half has been providing these insights to employees impacted by redeployment. Retirement is just another form of redeployment and while we need to be creative about working arrangements, it is necessary to provide accurate insights to needed skills and expertise. This is imperative to all employees in the workforce. Maturing employees need to focus on skills that will continue to make them valued in the marketplace. Less mature employees have similar needs. They need development insights as they prepare themselves for shifting workforce needs in IBM and to create a pipeline of skills for transitioning employees. In both situations this emphasis assists IBM in making optimal learning investments.

Organizations like the US Department of Labor are focusing on getting this type of information out to the public through CareerOneStop websites. [http://www.careeronestop.org/]

Making these life and career transitions requires a focus on the 'human connections' we provide, the accuracy of the content/information delivered and the guidance and counseling needed in this situation in order to keep people engaged and promote expertise vitality.

[Harold Blake]

You are right on the money here from my perspective. This maturing workforce problem is global in nature. A lot of my colleagues are going to be retiring over next few years. I am getting theses same type of inputs from folks in Europe, AP and across NA. While people are starting to think through what to do next, a lot of times I hear that they would like to maintain their professional career network while also building new ones. If businesses could just implement work plans that let us preserve some of those networks, stay plugged in to what is happening, a lot of people would continue working for their employer on a part time basis. Part of this is included in a project I am driving for IBM called the Workforce Management Initiative. Which in part, is categorizing all of the skills and talent of IBM employees, so when an IBMer retires, we know in advance what skills he/she is walking out the door with, which can alert HR to find similar skills either within the company or through recruiting efforts.