Public sector seniors are more hi-tech than private workers

Public sector workers over the age of 50 are more computer literate than those of the private sector: 87% vs 68%. This emerged from a Insee study on the use of the most modern technological tools in the French labour market. This can be explained by the higher number of training courses that have been organized in the last 20 years by public bodies for their senior employees compared to private companies. These last prefer to relegate senior workers to more manual tasks, rather than spend their resources in order to let them move with the times and assign young people the most technological tasks. This strategy is generally difficult to implement for public corporations where staff is on the average older than that of the private sector and cannot be easily replaced with new generations because of stricter hiring processes, longevity step increments and a low internal mobility.