The majority of Printweek readers (54%) have said that age is no barrier to recruitment in their business and they regularly hire staff over the age of 50.

The recruitment of older workers has become a significant issue in recent months, with official figures from the ONS showing at the end of 2022 that more than half a million people had dropped out of the workforce.

At the end of January, chancellor Jeremy Hunt announced to over-50s that “Britain needs you”.

Manufacturing sector industries like print and packaging have many good reasons to recruit and retain older workers, according to Emily Andrews, deputy director for work at non-profit the Centre for Ageing Better.

She said: “The country’s changing demographic means the proportion of older workers will continue to grow and increasingly become the solution to skills and labour shortages. 

“Employers in all sectors need to act now to attract and retain older workers or they will fall behind their competitors.”

Steps that printers can take to attract and retain older workers include actively looking to hire older workers, creating an age-friendly culture, encouraging career development at all stages of life and adopting flexible working practices.”

Introducing flexible working for print-floor workers can be difficult, however, according to Brendan Perring, IPIA general manager, because of the difficulty in standardising print schedules.

“Many medium-sized print houses, week to week, don’t know what jobs they’ll be processing. So one week, they may need the litho operator in full-time, and the next week, they will need a digital operator.

“It is a barrier to flexible work in the print industry. In the old days, there was so much work around, and it was so consistent, that print businesses could structure their working hours accordingly.”

Andrews added that each business would have its own constraints and opportunities when trying to implement changes that would make work more friendly to older workers.

She said: “The manufacturing sector has a high proportion of older workers, especially men, and has been a significant area for older worker redundancies in the wake of the pandemic. Employers need to find ways to make work viable and appealing to their older workers or risk losing invaluable expertise.”

Alistair Hunter, managing director of marketing firm DS Group, told Printweek that a less formal approach to being flexible had worked for his company.

He said: “We do try and create flexible work by saying to people, if they want to start at seven, they can leave at three o’clock, for example; but we have found it difficult to put in place any kind of flexible working ‘pattern’.”

DS Group itself, which employs 23 staff, has not had a single employee leave in the past five years.

Key to these high retention levels, he said, has been taking a holistic approach of up-skilling, re-skilling, and ensuring staff are supported and engaged with the company’s purpose.

“Where we can, we try and retrain people as much as possible, or upskill them so they can do a variety of work,” he said.

“It’s about understanding their needs. If they have to go to the dentist, we don’t moan about it, we’ll work around it. Our sickness levels - I don’t think they could be any lower.”

He added: “It’s all about getting employees to think about the importance of the work they’re doing, and how that fits into the business. If you can do that, then I think it just makes life so much easier for everybody.”

In general, however, the print industry does very well at employing older workers, according to Perring, because it relies on an ageing, shrinking, pool of skilled workers.

He said: “In my mind, the honest answer is that I think it is almost the opposite problem: there are a lot of skilled print people in print businesses, but if you walk in, the average age of the workforce is probably mid 40s to late 50s.

“The industry - compared to others - does incredibly well at employing older workers. So that’s great for [the problem of older people being out of work], but actually it is going to become a bigger and bigger issue.

“The talent and training to replace these skillsets when they leave simply is not coming up through the ranks - that’s more difficult work.”