Time Takes Us All? A Two Wave Study of Age and Time Effects on Sustainable Employability

Various cognitive and physical abilities are found to decline with age. However, contrary to popular belief, it still remains a topic of disc whether these declines in abilities actually affect older employees’ capacities to function in their work and on the labor market remains topic of discussion. A major difficulty in assessing age effects is that they can be distorted by time effects. Therefore the present article aims to contribute to this discussion by disentangling the effects of age and time on sustainable employability. First, using a two wave sample of 2,672 employees (ages 35 to 65 years) from various Dutch organizations, multilevel regression analyses are used to estimate the effects of age and time on sustainable employability’s dimensions. Second, between- and within-subjects variances are estimated for each of the nine relevant dimensions of sustainable employability (over a timespan of two years). Analyses reveal that age has merely small effects on only two dimensions (i.e. employability ...