Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The first step to understanding the link between job demands and job sustainability for older workers is understanding if older workers face different physical and mental job demands and have different abilities and preferences for work than their younger selves. This paper asks, How do individuals’ job demands change over the course of their working lives? Do older workers prefer different kinds of jobs than younger workers; for example, are they willing to accept earnings losses to transition to jobs that are less physically demanding or stressful? And to what extent are older workers less able than younger workers to perform certain kinds of jobs? To help answer these questions, we use newly collected data on working conditions and job preferences of a nationally representative panel of U.S. workers and nonworkers ages 18-70. We find that compared to younger workers, older workers (e.g., 62+) face similar working conditions across a number of dimensions, yet they value job characteristics differently. Specifically, older workers have stronger preferences for: schedule flexibility, jobs with little physical activity, telecommuting opportunities, well-defined tasks, working in teams and paid time off; older workers have weaker preferences for job training opportunities and jobs with frequent opportunities to serve their community/society.