The Retention of Older Employees and Core Work Activities: Evidence From Denmark

Retention of older employees in the labor market is crucial to cope with aging populations. Retention of older employees can appear in different forms, such as phased retirement, bridge jobs, career development, or health promotion. However, little is known about how the offering of these retention strategies may vary across workplaces with different core work activities because the opportunities to implement different types of retention strategies are preconditioned by differences in the economic and labor market climate.

The study utilizes data from a survey conducted among Danish workplaces in 2018, which is linked to administrative register data to conduct Karlson-Holm-Breen-corrected logistic regression models. The study distinguishes among production workplaces, service and welfare workplaces, and information workplaces.

Phased retirement is most prevalent in service and welfare workplaces, whereas job bridging is most prevalent in both service and welfare and production workplaces. Career development and health promotion strategies are least prevalent in production workplaces. These retention differences between workplaces with different core work activities are in most cases explained by differences in trade union influence, physical working demands, and knowledge intensity.

Although the type of retention strategy offered in the workplace largely matches the core work activity within the workplace, particularly production workplaces could feasibly take more advantage of using career development or health promotion strategies because the employees of these workplaces are more likely to retire early due to poor health and physical working conditions.