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AuntyBev |
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posted on October 15, 2006 08:14:25 PM |
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Excellent post koro, and one with which I heartily agree. In my husband’s case it’s bit tricky. While there are a number of excellent workplace related courses that the company organizes, a bully boss has ways and means of keeping opportunities to an extremely bare minimum even if you are prepared to do the courses in your own time without pay. And a bully boss can keep wages to an extremely bare minimum too so it’s difficult to find a bit of spare cash to pay for relevant courses yourself.
But let’s take the discussion into more general terms into what this emerging research might mean to Australia.
For a long time now, we’ve been warned about an emerging skills shortage in Australia and now we’re definitely there. Even Adelaide’s Sunday Mail had an article yesterday about increasing numbers of Visa workers filling the gap in skills and trades, and we’ve had the announcement of a new government initiative to encourage ‘school drop outs’ back into training.
But in view of this new research, shouldn’t we also be considering the training/retraining of older people? Some more mature people would find it difficult to meet the cost (mortgages, family expenses etc), and some might not believe that they’d be able to learn new tricks because their brain is past some imagined best before date.
But, as Miriam in the Catalyst program showed, they might be able to learn a lot quicker and better than they could in their younger days, and now that we seem to be approaching a time when more mature people tend to take better care of their health and fitness than the younger ones, the training can be viewed as a good investment resulting in quite a few productive years work from the newly trained more mature worker.
I’m all for shaking up the framework. In thinking how I might personally do this, I’ve come up with the idea of launching a research project through the International High IQ Society with the aim of producing a discussion paper about opportunities and attitudes towards mature people throughout the world. IHIQS has a global membership of all ages and, while we may not be able to produce a lot in the way of quantitative research (although I think some would be able to come up with cognitive tests), I think we should be able to produce a discussion paper that might stir things up a bit.
And maybe with your resources and network contacts, you might be able to do something to challenge attitudes in the government and among the employers.
What do you reckon? Are you up to finding ways of putting this emerging research to practical use?
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