Too old to learn? Specific needs of senior workplace learners

Due to Demographic change universities, vocational trainings, and advanced trainings are challenged to educate learners with diverse backgrounds such as age, country of origin and educational achievement. These groups of learners are supposed to have different, individual learning requirements. However, there is still only sparsely knowledge about their needs and how to take them into account in appropriate learning scenarios. Especially the aspects of senior learners aged 50 years and older are hardly explored. In this contribution, the results of a literature review and an expert workshop on the specific needs of senior learners are presented and discussed. Firstly, an overview on current age sensitive learning scenarios is given. These do all have the claim to be attached to the professional experiences, learning interests and needs of older employees. Secondly, the different approaches lead to main requirements for designing such learning scenarios in an ideal way. Thirdly, participants of an expert workshop representing different perspectives from science and practice agreed that with regard to demographic changes, educating senior workers will become an important issue for most companies. However, they expressed very diverse and sometimes contradicting opinions on how learning scenarios for senior workers should be designed. The workshop showed that it still has to be considerated, how far these findings about senior learners differ from “good” approaches of teaching and learning in general.