VicHealth researcher: Libby Brooke
“This research meets the workforce demographic challenge of reintegrating older workers in areas of skills shortages which match the labour supply needs of an ageing population”
Associate Professor Libby Brooke is based at the Business Work and Aging Centre at Swinburne University where she is developing a holistic and integrated approach to increasing the employability of older workers.
Contact Associate Professor Brooke
Phone: 03 9214 5949
Email: LBrooke@groupwise.swin.edu.au
Website: www.swin.edu.au/business/businessworkageing
Libby’s research - managing employment pathways to reintegrate older workers - targets workers aged 45 and over who are unemployed, retirees who wish to re-enter the workforce, and work injured older people. It aims to develop a program that will support them to rebuild the confidence and skills they need to re-enter, and stay in, employment. The program will also identify employment pathways which connect recruitment, training and retention in care services occupations.
This project applies an innovative, internationally recognised, best practice framework, based on the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health (FIOH) ‘work ability’ approach to employability. Currently there is no employment services model for increasing the employability of older workers which takes a holistic, integrated approach involving healthy lifestyle promotion and motivational factors (including self-perceptions of capacity and age awareness). This work meets the workforce demographic challenge of reintegrating older workers in areas of skills shortages which match the labour supply needs of an ageing population.
The Business Work and Ageing (BWA) Centre for Research is located at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne and undertakes projects which aim to prolong working lives through organisational policy making and interventions supporting older workers’ health and wellbeing...
Libby’s research and resulting program will extend current training or recruitment-based approaches by creating an employment pathways and systemic capacity in recruitment, training and retention in workplaces.
She sees VicHealth as an innovative, change-driving institution which creates unique opportunities for developing new systemic capacity, confirmed by rigorous research evidence, that enhance the health and wellbeing of populations.+.