Several countries have increased the retirement age for workers. This has resulted in highly experienced employees to be employed by companies for a longer duration. However, in my opinion this creates a lack of innovation in the workplace as older workers are not familiar with modern technologies.
One of the benefits of extending the retirement age is that greatly experienced workers can provide supervision and teach less experienced workers. This is because older employees have amassed great knowledge by having to face problems related specifically to their work for 30 to 40 years. Furthermore, the specific knowledge on how to face each problem cannot be found in literature, but has to be learned from someone with great experience. For instance, an employee operating a boiler for 30 years will have faced and resolved every issue possible in the boiler. Therefore, this experience is priceless for a company and needs to ensure that the specifc knowledge is passed on to recent employees. On the other hand, I argue that innovation is critical for a company to move forward which cannot be expected from old employees.
Although experienced employees near their retirement age are a giant container of knowledge they lack the ability to produce creative ideas. A company needs to be up to date with their technology in order to stay ahead of their competition. For example, Nokia the mobile phone company which did not innovate and got lost behind its more innovative competitors had to place itself on the market to be bought by Microsoft. Hence, more fresh employees are important, so that they may provide creative solutions to problems. Thus, I believe that the retirement age should not be raised as the benefits of a creative worker outweighs the greatly experienced employee.
In conclusion, raising the retirement age allows a company to have a grealty knowledgeable employee. Nevertheless, I think that the need for more innovation in companies is far more critical as compared to sheer experience.