Question 1 and 2
Tough the article points out benefits and praise the employment and retention of mature workers; it is still challenging to implement the policies of employment and retention of mature workers. With the baby boomers come to aged, the world population is now rapidly aging. Employers have no choice but to hire mature workers in need of labor supply despite tons of challenges arising out of this issue. The first challenge that employing mature worker concerns with an unavoidable effect of aging. Aging inevitably brings deterioration in physical, physiological and psychosocial capacities. Loss of physical strength, vision, hearing and mental agility becomes a major challenge in the employment issue of mature workers, since these will cause unwilling problems in having the job done efficiently and effectively in always demanding working environment.
Auspiciously, there are two strategies that can to help to overcome the challenge; administrative solution and engineering solution. Administrative solution, done by the management, means limiting the harmful effects due to the stressful job by job redevelopment, job rotation, flexible work scheduling, etc. Engineering solution, on the other hand, takes care of the job and work environment. With the aim of controlling the risks of physical harms, this strategy is to redesign the tools, equipment and even the job and working environment more suitable for mature worker. This modification will lead to improvement in mature workers’ job performance such as higher productivity. Implementation of these strategies may not completely solve this complicated issue but it will result an obvious improvement.
As technology is one of the giant factors that influence the business world, the lack of technology skills is quite challenging for the aged worker to enter the competitive business world. Even though some mature worker had learned new technologies in their previous job that skills are too specific to transfer or apply on another job. Nowadays, ability to leverage new technologies can even determined the overall work performance.
However, there’s a simple strategy to handle this lack of skill matter. A training program will be a solution for it. The older generation will, naturally, learn slower than youth but it does not necessarily means they lost their ability to learn at all. Additionally, supportive environment of the company will makes it possible for the mature workers to learn new technologies more timely.
Sometimes a solution to one problem will raise another problem. The training program will solve the lack of skill issue but it raises another challenge; is the time and cost devoted to the training of mature workers worth? In cost-cutting business world, all employers have to tighten their belt. None will expect to pay for extra expenditures. Employers will more willing use readily available youth than need-to-retrain mature workers. That makes employers give a second thought on employing mature workers who will, apparently, work for their company shorter than young workers. Perhaps expenditure may be the main reason of the companies’ reluctance in employing mature workers.
Yet, with the tremendous growth of aged population, mature workers will possibly become a mainstream of labor supply in near future. That will make sense for businesses to start implementing the employment policies of mature worker foreseeing the future. Budgets are tight, but it’s time business should start retraining the mature work force. In such a difficult situation, government should give a hand to the businesses financially for mature employee retraining programs or provide compulsory training programs to every mature worker in the labor market for the good of both businesses and mature workers. From my perspective, it is all the main challenges rising form the issue of employing and retention of mature workers and strategies to manage these challenges in a diverse workforce with a sizable number of mature workers.

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