FACING THE DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGE – MICROTRAINING FOR LOW-SKILLED AND AGEING WORKERS

Modern economies currently face rapid changes in their social structure. Declining fertility rates and increasing life expectancy lead to the overall trend of the demographic change, which forms a strategic issue for all European societies (Tivig et al. 2008). While the domestic labor forces are ageing with the prospect of shrinking, reports about the shortage of skilled workers regularly appear in our daily news. Against the background of the recovering economy, organizations lack well skilled workers (Mesaros et al. 2009), while this shortage cannot be compensated by immigration solely. Therefore European societies have to foster their efforts to tap the domestic human capital.

To cope with the demographic change and to face the shortage of skilled workers the employability of low-skilled and ageing workers has to be secured through demographic-sensitive learning offers. Alerting in this context is, that the participation rate of low-skilled and ageing workers in further education lacks behind other groups of learners (Bellmann & Leber 2008). Low-skilled and ageing workers are structurally disadvantaged cause nearly no learning offers exist which are directly targeted to this group and their special learning needs (DIE 2008).

The knowledge platform RELOAD, which was developed by IMA/ZLW & IfU of RWTH Aachen University and funded by the European Leonardo program, is such a demographic sensitive learning offer especially dedicated to low-skilled and ageing workers in the Do-it-yourself sector. The sector traditionally occupies a large number of low-skilled and ageing workers from outside the sector. Against the background of the demographic change this situation will exacerbate and the Do-It-Yourself sector will be more and more relying on low-skilled and ageing workers in the future.