YOU do not have to go far to find a story telling you that your twilight years are going to have to be lived in penury.

As a nation we are not, it seems, saving enough to fund our retirements while it is a widely accepted fact that, despite getting gold-plated annual rises, the state pension will quite simply not be enough to live on.

Is there anything we can do about it? With most people in full-time employment now a member of a workplace pension scheme thanks to the Government’s auto-enrolment scheme, the simple answer would yes: we can all just save a bit more.

The bad news, according to Jeanette Makings, head of financial education at banking group Close Brothers, is that that may be easier said than done.

“Not only are people failing to save enough, but many simply don’t understand the different savings choices available or how to evaluate which ones are best for them,” she explained.

“Worse than that, the industry is not geared up to help them. Product providers can explain their own products, and comparison websites may be helpful to compare products of the same type, but there are very few providers able to help individuals look across the savings landscape in its entirety and choose what’s best for them.”

The answer, she believes, lies with employers, who despite offering retirement saving vehicles to their employees are leaving them to make their own decisions about how to use them.

As most employees are unaware of how much they need to be saving for a comfortable retirement or how to invest their money in order to maximise its growth potential, many are making minimum contributions into low risk - and hence low return - default investment portfolios.

“A huge part of the challenge therefore, is to encourage the provision of good financial education in the workplace that looks at savings as a whole and the different options available,” Ms Makings said. “Employers are hugely trusted and perfectly placed to close this knowledge gap.”

Nigel Peaple, deputy director of defined contribution lifetime savings and research at the Pensions and Lifetime Saving Association, agreed, noting that employers have a big role to play “in helping employees to be financially prepared for retirement”.

“Regular income from full-time employment is the building block for many people’s financial stability so it makes sense that they would also look to their employers for support with financial education, pensions and lifetime saving,” he said.

While arming employees with the knowledge on how to get the most out of their savings is one thing, research organisation the Pensions Policy Institute (PPI) believes employers need to go further and bear a greater share of the savings burden too.

Having carried out research on behalf of NOW:Pensions, an organisation that provides a pension scheme for businesses to automatically enrol their staff into, the PPI found that UK employers are contributing far less towards their staff’s futures than their peers in other countries that also have auto-enrolment schemes in place.

While employers in Italy were found to be bearing 84.8 per cent of the contribution burden and those in Denmark were bearing 66.7 per cent, in the UK the proportion is just 37.5 per cent.

Current minimum contribution levels, which see employees and employers each pay one per cent of salary into an individual’s pot, are due to increase over the next two years, with employers having to pay a minimum of three per cent and employees a minimum of five by 2019.

According to Adrian Boulding, director of policy at NOW: Pensions, this will put even more of a burden onto employees who, without the incentive of sizeable contributions from their employers to encourage them to stay put, could be prompted to opt out of making any contributions at all.

“Right now, the message is strong and clear – you pay in and your employer matches it,” he said.

“But as the higher statutory minimum contributions are phased in over 2018 and 2019, employees will find themselves bearing more of the burden than their employer and this inequality could drive opt outs.”

The good news, according to Prudential, is that the younger generation is getting more switched on to the need to save for retirement, with research from the insurance giant finding that 57 per cent of millennials considered the quality of their current employer’s pension scheme before deciding whether to take the job and will also assess any potential new employer’s pension scheme before moving jobs in the future.

With the younger generation already influencing all kinds of employment practices, from agile working to dressing down, perhaps this will be just the incentive employers need to look again at what they are offering by way of pensions.