Professional Development among Middle-Aged Women: A Rising Phenomenon in Ghana Commercial Bank

Abstract

The objective of this study is to examine the exponential increasing number of middle-Aged women in public sector organisations in Ghana. The study specifically investigates female staffs of the Ghana Commercial Bank wanting to undertake professional developing Programmes either through self-motivation or by propulsion from management of the Bank. The challenges they also experienced in the pursuit of such objectives such as improper job positioning and poorly regulated professional developments initiatives are among. The study underscored the short and long terms effects on their job placement for the rest of their working lives. It is a survey design with descriptive statistics of qualitative and quantitative data analysis through the application of statistical package for Social Scientist [SPSS] and excels of the Microsoft tools. Both structured and non-structured questionnaires and interview schedules were used to sample 50 out of 57 randomly from 136 middle-aged women who are employees in ten branches of the bank in the Accra Metropolis. This represents 4.3% of the 136 female staffs of the bank. The retrieval rate stands at 81.14% which accounts for the 50 respondents. The study results show that majority of female employees in formal establishments are generally limited by their social and domestic roles to achieve educational goals in life. In effect, only few women are found in managerial positions in the bank. This is due to the inequality in the selection process for training to managerial positions in the Bank. This study therefore recommends affirmative actions of giving special quota and financial aid to middle-aged women during training in all organisations after the selection. This must include both self-initiated development programmes and those organised by management.

Keywords: Professional development, facilitated learning, vestibule training and gender stereotyping.