Czechia is aging: workers over 60 now outnumber twenty-year-olds two to one

The Czech labour market is aging rapidly: according to the Czech Statistical Office, in the second quarter the country had 644,000 people over 60 who were employed or seeking work — almost twice the 297,500 twenty-year-olds in the same situation. The total working-age population (employed and job-seeking) in Czechia stood at 5.33 million people, more than 87,000 higher than a year earlier.

"The aging trend is clearly visible on the labour market," the Statistical Office notes, adding that this applies to both employees and entrepreneurs. The reason is the growing share of older age groups, which are gradually moving into higher age brackets.

Companies need older workers but limit their opportunities

Despite being in demand, Czechia has yet to learn how to make full use of the potential of older employees. "Companies need older workers and value them, but at the same time they narrow the space for them to prove themselves," said Jana Pikardová, head of the "Neviditelní" (The Invisible) project, which deals with employment issues for older people.

The problem is confirmed by data from the Institute of Health Information and Statistics: over the next ten years, the large generation born in the 1970s — the so-called "Husák's children," named after Gustáv Husák, president of Czechoslovakia at the time — will begin retiring en masse. Fewer people will be earning wages, while the number of pensioners will keep growing. By mid-century, the working-age population is projected to be 700,000 smaller than it is today.

Besides the aging population, the situation is also affected by young people staying in education longer and the government's gradual increases to the retirement age. The shortage of workers is partly offset by an influx of foreigners — alongside Slovaks and Ukrainians, the number of Filipinos is noticeably rising. Foreign workers are employed mainly in manufacturing, construction, logistics, transport, hospitality and healthcare, though their average age will also rise over time.

Retraining is unavoidable

Experts believe companies will have to pay more attention to working with older employees, even though they are often overlooked during recruitment today. "More than half of the long-term unemployed are people over fifty, while among the short- and medium-term unemployed they make up roughly a third. This gap shows that the problem isn't a lack of willingness to work, but systemic barriers to returning to the labour market," explained Michal Španěl, an analyst at the job portal JenPráce.cz.

These barriers include an insufficient supply of retraining programmes and companies' cautious approach to hiring. "Companies invest in developing their existing employees, but they're quite wary of hiring people who changed careers significantly later in life. In the future, though, we simply won't be able to do without them," noted labour market analyst Tomáš Ervín Dombrovský of Alma Career, which runs the Práce.cz and Jobs.cz job portals.

"If we keep turning people away from jobs they've retrained for, simply because we consider them too old, we're going to have a serious problem on our hands," he added.

Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz