The youngest age group experienced least workload and best support from supervisor. Two explanations may fit. The youngest workers are relatively inexperienced and starting their career through which they probably have less tasks and responsibilities. Also, many of these workers may be PhD students, whom are clearly assigned a supervisor and who receive relatively much support. Only in skill discretion and in “I expect positive results from clarifying the work objectives”, they had least favourable scores. When work experience grows and tasks are expanded, more possibilities to use skills and knowledge will appear. Older workers scores may reflect their years of experience

on the job, which was significantly higher than in the other age groups (see Table 1). It is to be expected Vemurafenib clinical trial that older workers

have accomplished many of their goals in working life. This might explain why their mean scores for readiness for further education, “I am ready to take on new selleck tasks all the time” and “I expect positive results from regular attention to career and development opportunities” where least favourable. This tendency that older workers are less enthusiastic to join in further education is also found in other research (Muffels 2003; Ilmarinen 2005). However, supplementary analysis on a separate item from the ‘opportunities for further education’ scale does not support this explanation. Older employees felt significantly more responsible for keeping pace with the new knowledge and skills needed for further development than the workers in the younger age groups (almost 90 vs. about 75%, respectively). This attitude was also found among alumni at a US state university’s School of Business.

Age did not appear to be associated with the hours the alumni invested in professional development (Greller 2006). All in all, the mean scores suggested that working conditions were good. Interesting is that three of the six work characteristics with disappointing scores in all the age groups were related to support and appreciation. Most favourable work characteristics were reported by the youngest and the oldest age groups. This does not correspond with the negative beliefs, Edoxaban many employers (especially the younger ones) were found to have about older employees (Chiu et al. 2001; Visser et al. 2003; Remery et al. 2003; Peeters et al. 2005; Henkens 2005), although not all the research confirmed this (Munnel et al. 2006). For instance, older workers were expected to be less able to cope with a heavy workload (Visser et al. 2003) and hard to (re)train, while depletion of professional knowledge and skills were considered to be the most important obstacles against employing older workers (Taylor and Walker 1998). Our results show that statistical differences are present, but that these differences are small.