Fewer Health Troubles for Older Workers With the Right Job

Older workers are valuable to companies but need the right role to keep them from retiring. Pikselstock/Shutterstock

Staying in the wrong job can be bad for the health of older people and push them into early retirement, research suggests.

The researchers found that when older workers’ reasoning abilities matched well with their job demands, they reported fewer chronic health problems than when they couldn’t keep up. And when workers couldn’t keep up with the reasoning demands of their jobs, the odds that they would stay at work decreased by nearly 34 percent, meaning they were that much more likely to retire.