Facing the Demographic Change in European Societies: A Semantic-based Learning and Knowledge Platform for Ageing Workers.

Modern economies currently face rapid changes with regard to their social structure and work environment. Declining fertility rates and increasing life expectancy lead to the overall trend of the demographic change. As a consequence, domestic labor forces are ageing with the prospect of shrinking. The upcoming labor shortage cannot be compensated by immigration solely, but rather through lifelong learning and continuous development of competences to secure lifelong employability. Modern societies can no longer afford to exclude ageing workers from the labor market, e.g. through methods like early retirement policies. To cope with the demographic change and to face the shortage of skilled workers, the employability of ageing workers has to be secured through demographic-sensitive learning offers. Striking and alerting in this context is that the participation rate of low-skilled and ageing workers in further education lags behind other groups of learners, and nearly no learning offers exist which are directly targeted to this group and their special learning needs (cf. chapter 1). The learning and knowledge platform RELOAD, which was developed by IMA/ZLW & IfU of RWTH Aachen University, Germany and funded by the European Leonardo da Vinci program, is such a demographic sensitive learning offer especially dedicated to low-skilled and ageing workers in the Do-it-yourself sector (cf. chapter 2). The main innovations of the RELOAD learning and knowledge platform are short learning units, so called Microtrainings (cf. chapter 2.1) and the usage of a semantic net (cf. chapter 2.2). Thereby, they are individual, self-directed and continuous learning processes. Furthermore Microtrainings can be easily integrated into the work life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]