Employers should be required to offer older workers the same training opportunities they offer younger ones.

In many companies, young employees receive more chances to learn new skills than older ones. Some people think the law should make employers give the same training to all workers. I agree with this opinion.

Firstly, it is not fair to give fewer opportunities to a person because of their age. Older workers do the same job and have the same responsibilities, so they should have the same rights. If a company teaches a new computer system only to young staff, older employees cannot do their work well, and then the company says they are not good workers. This is a problem that the company created itself.

Secondly, older workers have a lot of experience. They know the customers, they know the problems of the company, and they can teach younger colleagues. If they also receive modern training, they become very useful employees. So training them is not a waste of money for the company.

However, some employers say that older workers will retire soon, so the training money is lost. I understand this idea, but many people now work until they are sixty-five or older, so the company still has many years to get the benefit.

In conclusion, I agree that employers should be required to train older workers equally, because it is fair and because these workers are valuable for the company.

Training budgets in most organisations are not distributed evenly across age groups, and it is increasingly argued that the law should require employers to offer older staff the same opportunities as younger ones. I agree, principally because voluntary provision has failed for a reason that is unlikely to correct itself.

The reason is arithmetic rather than prejudice, which is precisely what makes it so persistent. Employers treat training as an investment and estimate how many years they will recoup it over, so a fifty-five-year-old is quietly assessed as a shorter payback period than a thirty-year-old. No individual manager needs to hold discriminatory views for the outcome to be discriminatory; the calculation produces it automatically. Because the logic feels rational to the person applying it, appeals to fairness have had very little effect, and this is a strong argument for regulation rather than encouragement.

The assumption behind the calculation is also weaker than it appears. Younger employees change jobs far more frequently, so the expected tenure of a thirty-year-old may be no longer than that of a fifty-five-year-old, and often shorter. Meanwhile the cost of not training older staff does not disappear — it is transferred. Workers whose skills become obsolete are pushed out of employment years before retirement age and are then supported by the state, which means the public pays for a saving the employer made.

In conclusion, I agree that this should be a legal requirement. The market has had ample opportunity to solve it and has not, because the incentive that causes the problem is built into how firms evaluate people.

Almost nobody argues that older employees should be denied training; what is contested is whether employers should be compelled to provide it. That is the question, and it turns on whether the current shortfall is an oversight that persuasion could fix or a structural incentive that will not correct itself. I take the second view, and therefore agree.

The shortfall arises from an ordinary piece of financial reasoning. Training is capital expenditure on a person, and firms amortise it over the years they expect to retain them, so age functions as a proxy for return. A manager applying this logic need hold no hostility towards older workers at all — the discriminatory outcome falls out of a calculation that looks entirely responsible from inside the business. It is exactly this respectability that has made voluntary codes ineffective: you cannot shame people out of a decision they believe to be prudent.

The calculation is nonetheless built on a proxy that does not survive scrutiny. Job tenure has fallen fastest among the young, so expected remaining years with the firm frequently favour the older candidate, not the younger one. Worse, the assumption is self-fulfilling: staff who are passed over for development become less current, are then judged less capable, and leave — which is subsequently cited as evidence that investing in them was unwise. A belief that manufactures its own confirmation is not a market signal worth deferring to.

There is also the question of who ultimately pays. When skills are allowed to lapse, the worker does not simply become slightly less productive; they are pushed out of the labour market a decade before retirement and supported publicly thereafter. The employer's saving has not been made, only externalised, and a cost shifted onto the state is the standard justification for regulating a private decision.

I would qualify the requirement in one respect. Mandating identical spending per head would be blunt and easy to satisfy dishonestly; what the law should guarantee is equal access to development, with the burden on the employer to explain systematic disparities. That is enforceable, it targets the mechanism rather than the symptom, and it leaves genuine business judgement intact.