Similar sources of occupational self-efficacy to continue working despite dissimilar professional contexts

Retaining ageing workers in working life is a major concern. Occupational self-efficacy (OSE), i.e. workers’ belief in their own capabilities to perform work-related tasks successfully, is important for coping with the continuously changing working life. However, less is known about what influence ageing workers’ OSE. The occupations of home care workers (HCWs) and engineers have undergone major changes in recent years, and increasing demands threaten their longer working careers. These seemingly different occupations represented ageing workers in this study, to explore whether there are fundamental similarities in the sources of their OSE to continue working.
The study had a mixed methods design with a qualitative to quantitative approach. 330 HCWs and engineers (45-66 years) answered two open-ended survey questions about what affects their OSE to continue working until expected retirement age. Data analysis was conducted by transforming the categories that emerged from an inductive qualitative content analysis into quantitative counts, to reveal if some categories were more prominent than others.
The open-ended questions yielded 1634 utterances. The most frequently mentioned sources of OSE were similar for both HCWs and engineers: health, work characteristics, work environment aspects, knowledge and competence, meaningfulness of work, intrinsic motivation, and family and leisure. Positive age management, private economy and national decisions also influenced OSE.
There were mostly similarities in the sources of OSE for a full working life for HCWs and engineers. To improve OSE, it is important to support health, the working conditions that affect health, meaningfulness of work, intrinsic motivation, and competence.