Our Senior Aid on loan from the Area Agency on Aging for the past sev­eral years decided to retire. She manned the front desk in the morn­ings.  As the years went on and the orga­ni­za­tion embraced tech­nol­ogy there was less for her to do. She didn’t have a desire to learn to use a com­puter and no one had the heart to insist.

When I called the Agency to ask if they could set up some inter­views with com­puter users with recep­tion­ist skills they said no. They didn’t have any Silent Gen­er­a­tion clients that fit that descrip­tion. Whoa.… Could they send some­one with an inter­est in learn­ing? They would try.

If you trol­lop along with me vir­tu­ally you know I can­not extol the virtues of Stephen the Work­force Devel­op­ment & HR Intern enough. He is a snap­shot of today’s col­lege stu­dent with a very bright future ahead. He has a par­tic­u­lar inter­est in train­ing. Hummm.….

The Senior Aid now has an email address, checks cal­en­dars when she can’t locate some­one and has sched­uled “prac­tice” meet­ings on my cal­en­dar. Next les­son? To show her how to can­cel them.

Com­ments from the Senior Aide include, “He has such patience and man­ners and he really knows how to explain things. I’m not afraid or ner­vous any­more. In fact, I’m excited to learn more”.

They’re proud of their accom­plish­ments and each other.

I would love to hear other other exam­ples of suc­cess­ful inter-generational learn­ing, do you have one?