The motivation of older employees to learn is a complex psychological construct that has hardly been addressed to date. In times of demographic change, it is of central importance to motivate older employees for continuous training in order to keep them employable. With increasing age, changes in learning and performance as well as a decreasing motivation for further vocational training become apparent. Gernot Schiefer and Corinna Hoffmann show connections between motivation, performance and learning behavior and analyze motivational factors and learning obstacles of older employees. In a practical manner, the authors present possibilities for companies to actively contribute to promoting the learning motivation of their older employees.

The Authors:

Prof. Dr. Gernot Schiefer teaches business psychology and human resource management at the FOM University of Applied Sciences in Mannheim and works as a coach and consultant.

Corinna Hoffmann, M. Sc. works in the human resources department of an international consumer goods manufacturer.

This Springer essential is a translation of the original German 1st edition essentials, Lernmotivation und Weiterbildungsbereitschaft älterer Mitarbeiter by Gernot Schiefer and Corinna Hoffmann, published by Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature in 2019. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically different from a conventional translation. Springer Nature works continuously to further the development of tools for the production of books and on the related technologies to support the authors.