Scientific studies show that older employees do not generally become less capable, innovative, creative and resilient as a result of a natural decline process. The so-called deficit model of age must give way to a competence model, which describes in which performance areas older people remain the same, become weaker or even stronger. Often, the differences in job performance between members of the same age group are far greater than those between different age groups.

Aging only becomes a problem for companies and employees in the sense of a declining ability to cope with work when the intensity and one-sidedness of the stresses lead to the exhaustion of individual physical and psychological resources and health suffers.

From a scientific point of view, the task here is to adapt working conditions to the age structures in the company, i.e. to make them manageable and at the same time to strengthen and promote the individual resources of the employees. Every evaluation of work situations and conditions depends on the chosen standards of evaluation. The design principles for good working conditions offered from the perspective of occupational science can provide us with an essential benchmark here.

The target group is owners, managers and responsible persons in companies who are concerned with occupational health and safety and/or the performance of employees.

For technology developers, it means an additional qualification and an improvement in requirements engineering to be able to develop their systems taking into account the requirements of an aging workforce.