Vocational Training and Re-skilling of Senior Citizens

Abstract

The formation of a new technological economy serves as the basis for the study of factors that influence the human capital development. One of these factors is the knowledge acquired by a person throughout his life and which became an integral part of it. The necessity for a set of skills and competencies development is reflected in the concept of lifelong learning, which began to spread actively in the second half of the 20th century. The stage of the country’s adult population involvement in lifelong learning is considered one of the indicators of human capital development. The development of the lifelong learning system allows to solve a number of socio-economic problems, for example, increased labor productivity, obtaining skills necessary to use new technologies, and also, which is especially important for citizens of pre-retirement and retirement ages, the ability to combine personal aspirations in social adaptation with the working capacity maintenance. Which is directly connected with the labor market transformation, in which the issue of the population re-skilling in order to integrate it into rapidly growing, generally, technologically advanced sectors of the economy, is acute. Furthermore, the escalating global trend of population aging calls for the development of measures to attract senior generation to the programs of additional vocational training in order to update their professional competencies and acquire new skills. In this regard, the fact that Russia lags behind many countries, in particular the OECD in terms of the adult population coverage, especially of the senior generation in all forms of additional education, claims special attention. The purpose of this article is to analyze the current state, dynamics and the main institutions and tools of the lifelong learning system of the senior population, operating in some foreign countries, in particular in Europe, as well as in Russia.