SISC

SISC – Senior Intergenerational Social Capital, is an innovative project answering to a problem that the whole Europe is facing: a constantly ageing population and the consequent need to implement active ageing strategies in order to avoid social exclusion. This report is addressed to all the organisations and companies involved in the issue, trying to find out active ageing strategies addressed to employees.

The aim of SISC is to exploit the potential of senior workers, especially if close to retirement, fostering the transfer of individual know how and competencies to new generations of workers within companies.
Thus, it is calibrating a tool overcoming two main obstacles: (1) make seniors acquainted with their own individual acquis, stressing their “shadow competencies”; (2) provide knowledge/tools for properly transferring them to new generations of workers, enhancing their will to contribute to intergenerational learning.

So, the main target of the project is made of EU senior workers close to retirement. In the context of an ageing society it is particularly important to increase the value of competences and of expertise of senior workers by using them for the quality service for young people.
During the lifespan of the project, at least 80/120 senior workers have been e-trained on Mentoring, fostering their capability to identify and then transfer the owned competencies, experiences and social capital. Actually, they can transfer individual successes and obtain a great personal satisfaction; strengthen and put into practice own interpersonal and managerial abilities and extend own possibilities of success; be recognized as positive role model; expand individual horizons being stimulated by young workers’ questions.
Also young workers benefit from mentoring programs within EU companies: they develop their own skills and benefit from seniors’ social capital; in particular they obtain: listening (somebody to compare with and from who learn), good advices and explanations (when they cannot find the right way by their own; advices strongly reduce obstacles met during own professional path), open doors (access to unknown information, or easy identification of right persons to apply), a different perspective (different and more experienced points of view).
Companies draw benefits too: optimization of participation and experiences of both senior/young involved resources; possibility to facilitate processes of insertion and metabolization of enterprise’s culture, environment, implicit rules and shared values; moreover, an involvement based not only on economic aspects, but also on personal investment and sense of belonging increases the possibilities to reach prearranged objectives.
Trainers and HR managers: they obtain good reference models to be used with senior human resources, during training courses or competencies balance sessions.

The innovative aspect of the SISC project stands in its capability to face the problem of active ageing through tools able to highlight a real added value that can be transferred form a senior worker to his/her own enterprise and, at national and transnational level, to improve the competitiveness of the European system through an acquired capability to read and exploit the important contribution of elderly workforce’s to the knowledge-based society. This project proposal, in fact, starting form reflections on existing literature and form experienced Balance of Competences and Mentoring actions, transfer and re-interpret this knowledge focusing specifically on over 55 workers close to retirement, combining orientation and training within an INDIVIDUALISED e-learning pathway. A really innovative tool, bringing guidance and training into companies, provides an answer to the needs of the most crucial target of an ageing knowledge based Europe.