Home > All articles Understanding Experiences at the Workplace In response to recent shifts in the age composition of the workforce, employers have started to raise questions about whether age is related to employees’ experiences at work. Employers can use their understanding about age and generational differences to enhance the effectiveness of their talent management policies and practices for today’s multi-generational workforce. Although a new understanding about generational issues has started to emerge, a considerable amount of misinformation has also proliferated. W. Stanton Smith gets to the heart of the matter with the title of his 2008 book, Decoding Generation Differences: Fact, Fiction … or Should We Just Get Back to Work? 1 The Age & Generations Study conducted by the Sloan Center on Aging & Work at Boston College was designed and implemented in collaboration with forward-thinking employers to gather information about contemporary multi-generational work teams. This Research Highlight presents selected findings of this study that have relevance for strategic human resource decision making. We address the following questions: Do the perceptions maintained by workers of different ages/ generations about the quality of their jobs and employment situations vary? Do these perceptions vary depending on whether employees are in the early, middle, or late part of their careers? Are the perceptions of employees with different life course experiences (that is, those with and without dependent care responsibilities) similar or different? How do employees with different amounts of tenure with their current employers assess the quality of their employment experiences? This report is organized into three sections. First, we present some information about three different ways in which to group employees: age/generation, career-stage, and life course. Because tenure is often related to age, we also discuss groups according to tenure. Next, we provide an overview of some of the ways that we measure the quality of employment. Finally, we discuss the similarities and differences in the employment experiences of the members of these different groups. > Read the report     By KS Date 13-04-2009 Print this article | React to this article