Luc Sels

Flexibility, turnover and training

Addresses the question of whether a high turnover of staff is accompanied by lower investment in company‐training. By means of a written questionnaire, data were collected from 223 companies in four different sectors: the food sector, the wholesale trade, the printing industry and the software sector. Besides the turnover of staff, introduces the degree of contractual flexibility and the existence of an internal labour market as explanatory variables in the discussion. In contradiction to most labour economic thinking on training, finds a positive relationship between fluctuations in the number of employees and the investment in training. The findings indicate that company training is particularly concentrated on inflow and replacement problems. Therefore, concludes that financial support measures of governments might benefit more the recruitment policy of companies instead of the high ideal of “lifelong learning”.

Studying retirement from a career perspective: are people who take charge of their career less inclined to retire?

Many active ageing policies are inspired by the idea that sustainable careers may extend individuals’ working lives through their impact on career satisfaction and employability. However, empirical evidence on these assumptions remains scarce. Few studies on the transition to retirement take a career perspective. In this chapter, we investigate how career competencies influence the intention to retire through their impact on self-directedness, career satisfaction and employability. We thereby focus on two career competencies: self-awareness and adaptability. We examine how self-awareness and adaptability impact self-directedness and how employability in the internal and external labor market as well as subjective career satisfaction mediate the relationship between self-directedness and the retirement intention of older workers. Path analysis using a sample of 285 workers aged 50 or older reveals that self-awareness increases self-directedness, which, in turn, relates positively to external employability and career satisfaction. External employability and career satisfaction decrease the retirement intention. We did not find a mediating relationship via internal employability. The same counts for adaptability. In addition, adaptability is also related directly to retirement intention. We discuss the implications of these findings for research and practice.