Older workers needed — please apply

UK businesses will have to embrace the benefits of older workers in order to meet the “employment deficit” caused by a lack of young people coming into the labour market, the HR professionals' organisation the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development (CIPD) has warned.

According to the CIPD, UK employers will need to fill an estimated 13.5 million job vacancies in the next 10 years, but only seven million young people will leave education and enter the labour market during this period.

In its Managing a healthy workforce report, the CIPD said that employers will increasingly need to rely on older workers to fill this gap, with the Government Actuary’s Department predicting that, by 2020, more than a third of the working population (36%) will be over 50 years old.

An additional factor is that employers are now unable to use the default retirement age to issue compulsory retirement notifications, unless they can objectively justify it.

http://www.cipd.co.uk/publicpolicy/_managingahealthyageingworkforce