Career Development and Aging

Career development and aging represents a topic of growing importance for individuals as well as organizations. As society and the workforce is aging, late career employees embody a steadily growing proportion of the working population (Van der Heijden, Schalk, & Van Veldhoven, 2008). In order to create and maintain a successful and satisfying late career, this population has to successfully deal with today’s changing work environment and its demands. In this chapter, first a review traditional stage-based models of late career development is given. Then an overview of how the current work environment increasingly necessitates a protean career orientation and career adaptability among older workers is provided. The chapter concludes with implications for career counseling and HR practices regarding older workers

Geographical variations in sex ratio trends over time in multiple sclerosis.

A female/male (F/M) ratio increase over time in multiple sclerosis (MS) patients was demonstrated in many countries around the world. So far, a direct comparison of sex ratio time-trends among MS populations from different geographical areas was not carried out.In this paper we assessed and compared sex ratio trends, over a 60-year span, in MS populations belonging to different latitudinal areas.Data of a cohort of 15,996 (F = 11,290; M = 4,706) definite MS with birth years ranging from 1930 to 1989 were extracted from the international MSBase registry and the New Zealand MS database. Gender ratios were calculated by six decades based on year of birth and were adjusted for the F/M born-alive ratio derived from the respective national registries of births.Adjusted sex ratios showed a significant increase from the first to the last decade in the whole MS sample (from 2.35 to 2.73; p = 0.03) and in the subgroups belonging to the areas between 83° N and 45° N (from 1.93 to 4.55; p<0.0001) and between 45° N to 35° N (from 1.46 to 2.30; p<0.05) latitude, while a sex ratio stability over time was found in the subgroup from areas between 12° S and 55° S latitude. The sex ratio increase mainly affected relapsing-remitting (RR) MS.Our results confirm a general sex ratio increase over time in RRMS and also demonstrate a latitudinal gradient of this increase. These findings add useful information for planning case-control studies aimed to explore sex-related factors responsible for MS development