Nordic Tour Iceland: How to Sustain an Aging Workforce?

How to Sustain an Aging Workforce? The Impact of the Working Environment

Increased labour force participation and prolonged working lives are goals with high priority on the political agenda in most of the world’s industrialised nations, including the Nordic countries. Finding ways to sustain an ageing population in the workforce requires more knowledge about the processes shaping inclusion in and exclusion from the labour market. However, these processes involve complex interactions between multiple factors at several levels.

On this background the National Research Centre for the Working Environment in Denmark has taken the initiative to the Project, which aim is to systemize and disseminate knowledge on the impact of the working environment on work retention of elderly workers in a comparative Nordic perspective, and an extended aim is to identify central knowledge gaps which calls for increased Nordic research collaboration to provide the necessary knowledge base for political and workplace initiatives to obtain a more efficient and sustainable prolongation of the worklife of ageing workers.

The project is an extension of the Joint Programming Initiative – “More Years Better Lives – The Potential and Challenges of Demographic Changhe” (http://www.jp-demographic.eu) in which nine countries (including Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden) reviewed European and Canadian research on labour market participation and early retirement among older workers. The joint review report, as well as the national reports was published February 2015, and the Nordic national reports provide a strong knowledge base for the current Project focusing on the particular challenges and possibilities of the Nordic countries in a comparative perspective.

General information

Nordic Tour is  a series of one-day thematic lecture seminars which will circulate in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Iceland. The aim is to give national actors in each of these countries the opportunity to compare their own country’s position and strategies with the similar practices and perspectives of other Nordic countries. Each of the seminars acts as an independent entity.

In 2017, the topic is “How to Sustain an Aging Workforce? The Impact of the Working Environment”.