Western countries nowadays experience major challenges due to the transition towards “aging societies”. Although there are many positive aspects associated with this transition, i.e. older people enjoy longer and healthier life, other share some serious concerns. One of the concerns is the working-age population which is declining strongly and hereby causing to a shrinking of the workforce. This relative new phenomenon is forcing Germany’s labor market to find ways to compensate for the decline in productivity growth caused by this development. A rather short term solution to cope with this problem is prolonging the average duration of the working lives by elevating the retirement age and decreasing early retirement incentives. Those changes already resulted in an increase in the average retirement age as was shown in West Germany from 59.2 to 61.1 years between 1980 and 2004 (Riphahn & Trübswetter, 2007). However, in recent years additional steps have been taken in order to insure the employability of older workers by increasing investments in their human capital through participation in training programs as was declared by the European commission (2003): "Access of workers to training is an essential element of the balance between flexibility and security and the participation of all workers should be supported, taking into account the returns on investment for workers, employers as well as society as a whole”.

This research investigates the development of older workers participation in training programs in Germany, taking under consideration the effect of changes in the provision of training and new policy regulations of retirement exits. In particular, it is aimed to identify the factors which affect the training probabilities of older workers, i.e. individual and employment characteristics, and to check whether a noticeable increase in their probability of receiving training can be recognized over the years of the survey. In addition, differences across older workers’ age groups in those time periods will be examined as well. 

The basic prediction of the human capital theory is that older workers are less likely to participate in training programs than younger workers, due to lower net returns associated with this investment, both for the company and for the worker (Becker, 1993). However, as the participation rate of older workers in the workforce is becoming extremely important due to the ageing process of western countries, such prediction might be less realistic. Hence, this research aims to provide new findings suggesting that the aging process of the German workforce may affect the incidence of training of older workers.

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