The future of the ageing workforce in engineering: relics or resources?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Retaining older workers in productive employment is forecast to be a major issue as rapid changes, such as digitalisation and artificial intelligence, will transform how many roles are performed. Two such issues faced by older workers are normal age-related cognitive decline that affects reasoning and problem solving, and workplace stereotyping based on their age. Qualified engineers (n=25, range 24-77 years) participated in a non-verbal multiple-choice abstract reasoning test to assess problem solving ability, then individually interviewed on their perceptions of retaining older engineers in the workplace. The study finds all engineers scored similarly, however, the task revealed that older engineers faced with the same novel problem take significantly longer to solve than their younger counterparts. This finding is countered with evidence that younger engineers rely on older engineers' experience and knowledge for training and mentoring. This study highlights the benefits and resources that older engineers bring to the workplace.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".