of workers aged 55 years and over, and one of employers. The issue of older workers captured respondents' attention, with both studies receiving response rates of around 50%. The congruence of attitudes among older workers and employers regarding the efficacy of negative HRD stereotypes is a feature of the study. Older workers were in some agreement with employers that they were difficult to train, less willing to learn and afraid of new technology. Older workers saw provision of training as a concern, with 11.6% reporting discrimination with regard to training. Significantly, skilled older workers saw the provision of training as a signal by employers that they were to be taken as serious contributors.

In 1987 the American Society of Training and Development (ASTD) commissioned a competency development study for human resource development (HRD) practitioners (McLagan and Suhadolnik, 1989). The result was a prescriptive model of how to develop HRD practitioners grouped under the four headings of technical, business, interpersonal and intellectual (McLagan, 1989a(McLagan, , 1989b(McLagan, , 1989c. In New Zealand the focus has been primarily on training activity with little attention directed at developing the competency of our practitioners (Gilbertson et al.1987 competency model (McLagan andSuhadolnik, 1989). Five hundred and eighty-seven HRM job advertisements from The New Zealand Herald, The Dominion, and The Press throughout 1996 were coded into a database using content analysis. Results show that HRD represents approximately one third of all HRM activity with 200 (34 per cent) of the 587 advertisements speci cally requesting HRD competencies. A total of 1,113 competencies or approximately six competencies per job advertisement were identi ed. The competencies most in demand were for technical HRD skills (402, or 36 per cent) followed by interpersonal skills (291, or 26 per cent). The principal weakness of the ASTD model was that it did not re ect HRD practice by excluding personal competencies. Signi cantly, personal competencies (at 201, or 18 per cent) made up a sizeable proportion of the total competencies gathered.

Youth has for so long dominated our thinking about employment that political and policy responses and societal debate about the value of older workers has been stifled. Yet the urgency of population ageing in New Zealand at a time of projected labour shortages means older workers must urgently become a policy priority. Latest projections indicate that the population aged 65 years and over is expected to grow by about 100,000 during the current decade to reach 552,000 by 2011 . And by 2051 there are projected to be at least 60 percent more elderly than children (Statistics New Zealand, 2000). The threat of future labour shortages has been raised by numerous authors (Callister and Rose, 2001; Stephenson and Scobie, 2002; and the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research, 2002) with the older worker viewed implicitly as part of the problem. The paper reports on the largest contemporary study of mature job-seekers undertaken recently in New Zealand. It explores the job search efforts and behaviour of mature job seekers and the implications for policy intervention. The study also poignantly reveals the hidden personal and community costs of discrimination and unemployment amongst older people. The implications of framing employment as a youth concern only and the significance of disadvantaged older workers and job seekers is discussed. Finally the paper addresses the question of "what responsibility does society have towards skilled and unskilled older workers?"