Pledge Connections 25: Reflecting on past, present and future of Age-friendly Employment
Pledge Connections is our annual in-person event where Age-friendly Employers have the opportunity to network, share age-friendly practises, as well as hearing from us about the future vision of work for older workers.
3 min read
Tracy Riddell, Our Senior Programme Manager for Age-friendly Employment, reflects on the connections made at the event earlier this week.
Our hope for the Age-friendly Employer Pledge has always been to create a warm and welcoming experience for employers making their journey towards becoming Age-friendly employers. This week we were delighted to host our second Pledge Connections event, welcoming our Pledged employers to connect with each other, face-to-face, bringing their energy and enthusiasm to the conversation about the importance of older workers
The Pledge has continued to grow since Pledge Connections ‘24 in November last year, with more than 550 employers now on their Age-friendly journey, the delivery of a host of new webinars and the launch of our new Age-friendly Culture Toolkit.
At this year’s event, we looked at Pledge past, present and future. We looked forward to the future of the Pledge, with an update from Justin Newman, our Director of Strategy and Partnerships, about changes at the Centre for Ageing Better and the commitment to employers to work together to build sustainable solutions for the future of the Pledge. And I was proud to share news and updates about future work coming up in the next year in the form of Mid-life Reviews, a Framework Checklist and other areas of work in our future Pledge Pipeline, including new research on the needs of SMEs.
We looked back at our achievements and impact over the last three years since launch, with John Kiernan, our Employer Engagement Manager, presenting on all areas of work from the make-up of the network, subjects covered in our webinars, and how our Network Advisory Group is helping to shape and influence our work. John also shared some early insights from our evaluation work. These insights include the feedback from Pledge employers that the second most valued element of the Pledge is the knowledge and expertise of Ageing Better, something that I am particularly proud of.
We also looked externally with a session on labour market stats, featuring Naomi Clayton, CEO of the Institute of Employment. This proved to be such a useful and important topic and generated lots of questions from the audience. We know that the Pledge does not operate in a vacuum and that the wider economic context is vitally important to consider. We know it is important for Pledged employers to know what to expect and how they can prepare for the future. It is great to see more and more employers understand how in this broader context older workers are the solution to labour and skills shortages. This is a topic we will sure to be revisiting between now and the next Pledge Connections event.
The afternoon session was spent talking about a real priority for the Pledge team in developing an Age-friendly culture and there was plenty of insightful discussion into making positive change happen within an open, inclusive and respectful, age-friendly culture.
To finish off we have a few minutes of silent reflection time, where we asked employers to think about their reflections from the day and what action were they taking away. I’m very excited to see how that shows up in their work in the future as we continue to check in with Pledge employers on their journey.
Judging by the chat, the laughter and the exchanging of contact details at the event this week, I’d say Connections ‘25 lived up to its name for another year.
