Digitalisation and Older Workers
Digitalization, New Job-Demands, and Challenges for Older Self-Employed Workers View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Visa Rantanen
Self-employed entrepreneurs are more likely to continue working past retirement age compared to other workers in Europe. Self-employment may provide a suitable platform for continued work engagement for some workers while retirement ages are increased. Digitalization is likely to complicate the work force attachment of older self-employed by imposing new job-demands. Digitalization of services takes many forms: online bookings, online communications, social media presence, online adds and need for building and maintaining websites. Traditional non-digital businesses end up facing new job-demands; the need for acquiring new skills, knowledge, job planning, career planning and dealing with technology-induced interruptions and workflow intensification. There is little research on how older workers respond to digitalization and even less knowledge on implications for older self-employed workers specifically. This paper explores how older self-employed deal with new job-demands stemming from digitalization by studying what strategies they employ to deal with digitalization-induced job-demands and how digitalizationinduced job-demands shape their plans for withdrawing from work. The research uses multiple case study approach to sample different businesses that have adopted new digital technologies in their work processes. The cases are selected according to intensified new job-demand scale criteria: low (experiencing few new job-demands), medium (experiencing several new job-demands), high (experiencing most new job-demands mentioned in the criteria). The research builds a better picture of job-demands related to digitalization and their implications across a range of self-employed businesses and may identify successful strategies for older entrepreneurs to deal with these jobdemands.
Digitalization and Self-perceptions of Aging of Employees in Their Second Half of Working Life View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lisa Katharina Kortmann
Digitalization has and will alter the world of work and put new occupational demands on employees. Since occupations differ in in timing and extent to which they undergo digitalization processes, individuals differ with respect to the extent they face altered skill demands. Common age stereotypes attribute lower digital competences and a certain inability to adapt to technological changes to older workers. Thus far it is unclear, however, how older workers’ self-perceptions of their own aging (SPA) are affected by changes at work due to digitalization. Based on theoretical assumptions derived from Levy’s Stereotype Embodiment Theory, we hypothesize that SPA will become more negative for individuals working in occupations that are digitalised to a higher extent. To investigate this issue we use data from the German Ageing Survey (2014 and 2017) and estimate latent change score models. The results of the study provide some insights about issues arising from the interaction between population aging and digitalization processes in the world of work.
