Investigation on work motivation of Japanese seniors and skill discovery from their résumés

Abstract

Due to the fact that senior people possess special abilities such as knowledge, experience, and skills which young people do not have, they can be a driving force in the promotion of society. In order to leverage their extensive abilities, it is necessary to collect and organize them effectively. However, fundamental knowledge about seniors in the workplace is still lacking, in particular the types of workstyle preferred by this demographic and their opinions about an ICT-based workstyle are unknown. In addition, an effective method to estimate seniors' skills and knowledge in order to match them to appropriate jobs needs to be developed. In this study, we aim to clarify the work demands of seniors and then propose a method of analyzing their skills in order to match them to work profiles. First, a questionnaire survey was conducted with Japanese seniors. The results indicated that most of the participating seniors valued maintaining their health, achieving a feeling of accomplishment, getting to know one another, contributing to society, and personal growth, as strongly or moderately important to their work. The consciousness of an ICT-based work style was significantly higher in the participants who regarded personal growth and contribution to their colleagues as strongly important. Finally, we propose the concept of skill matching by means of similarity evaluations based on TF-IDF (term frequency - inverted document frequency) calculations in documents pertaining to worker information and work profiles. The results show that this method can be applicable to matching single senior workers with work profiles. © 2013 IEEE.