Towards Senior Workers' Innovative Training Challenges

Over the last years, professionals involved in adult education have faced the challenge to reconsider their way of working in terms of approaches, methods and tools. Increasingly, they have been requested to introduce learner-centred paradigms in training (to include learners’ background, motivation, expectations, inclinations, critical thinking skills, perspectives). With the profound transformation in pedagogical paradigms, tailor-made approaches have proven to be central to tackle the training of older workers with outdated skills, approaching the end of their career.

Such intense changes are combined with the current demographic emergency. The increasing number of workforces aged over 50, combined with a very low labour substitution rate make it a huge challenge to secure market productivity and competition as well as social cohesion – even more so, with the negative and unpredictable effects of the COVID-19 emergency. Public policies and businesses struggle to implement programmes to foster inclusion and sustainability within the market and business organizations regardless of the workers’ age. The skills demand by the labour market has been rapidly evolving, thereby dismissing some competencies because outdated, in favour of more modern ones, such as critical and computational thinking and problem solving, all to be applied to high-tech scenarios.

In this framework, the To SWITCH project sets as objective meeting all these challenges by enhancing the role of lifelong learning especially among 50-year olds and over.
To meet this objective, the project will focus on the definition of frameworks of competences, tools and methodologies to the benefit of all professionals addressing the training of older workers. Thanks to a hands-on lab-based approach, professionals from the different countries will share a new theoretical and methodological framework of reference based on an updated andragogical model for the training of older workers. They will collaborate on the development, implementation and experimentation of the digital platform for the training of trainers and on contents development (methodologies, tools, etc.) and will finally design training guidelines.