The Best Agers Lighthouses Project is bringing together partners from the whole Baltic Sea region in order to support the employment of older workers in small and medium-sized companies through Local Age Management Partnerships. The project presented its first results in Brussels on 13 May 2014.
The project is run by a number of regional or local governments, private companies and educational institutions. It follows up on the Best Agers project, which identified the specific strengths of older workers in the labour market of the Baltic region. With the Light Houses project, the consortium wants to actively apply the insights on company level. In all participating countries (Germany, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania and Sweden), public and private employers have designated internal mentors who work with an external advisor from the project partners on how to motivate and maintain older workers. The work is monitored by universities in Finland, Poland and Latvia.
Many of the companies surveyed are already aware of their ageing work force and labour shortages that might result from this, but only a few of them take a proactive approach to maintain them and to use their experience for internal mentoring, trainings or other activities that best use older worker’ potential, explained Anita Richert-Kazmierska (Gdansk University of Technology) and Katri Liekkilä (Aalto University).
The Light Houses project will continue until the end of this year and will feature a more thorough analysis of the Local Age Management Partnerships.
Project website: https://www.best-agers-lighthouses.eu/
For more information, please contact Philippe Seidel, Junior Policy Officer on Employment, philippe.seidel@age-platform.eu.
