Managing older talents in the context of aging society

Abstract

. Talents are more important than ever for the successful performance of organizations. The workforce is aging rapidly, and this trend creates both additional challenges for the companies and opportunities for the new directions in the management research. In the context of aging society, there is a lack of studies that analyze career development of older workers and especially older talents. In order to manage talented older employees, companies must reveal and fulfil their expectations and thus further develop their careers. To do so, older talents in later life have the following options: career mobility, workplace mentorship, volunteering, or older entrepreneurship. In order to find what practices are being taken by companies of various business industries in Lithuania to manage older talents, qualitative research strategy was employed. As the main method for the data collection, semi-structured in-depth interviews were adopted. The findings revealed, the majority of the companies support the idea that all their employees are talents, without indicating one particular age group, e.g. older workers. The respondents indicated the most valuable benefits given by the older talents as well as the main challenges that older talents impose in the organization. Older talents have some specific needs in comparison with younger talents, especially in training (which denies one of stereotypes that older workers can't be trained), as well as the need to contribute into the success of the company) and working conditions (e.g. flexibility). When evaluating the practices that are applied specifically to older talents, the most commonly mentioned among the respondents were various mentorship programs.