What’s the buzz on how organizations are addressing the delay in Boomer retirements?
This DI Buzz post looks at how delayed Boomer retirements coupled with the hiring of young professionals expecting a fast-track to management and supervisory roles is impacting companies and the workforce and what is being done to address the challenge.
Not too long ago (2008) articles like this one in Business Week, that talked about fast track programs designed to identify and develop leaders for companies facing an exodus of boomer before the end of the decade (last year) were quite common. http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_37/b4099044458684.htm
The challenge now is that despite those earlier claims that a large number of Baby Boomers were going to leave, companies are now facing the prospects of an increasingly “grayer” workforce and fast trackers waiting for the leadership posts to open up. A number of factors covered in this earlier DI Buzz posting have contributed to this cancellation of retirements. http://www.thedibuzz.com/?p=120
Essentially young, aspiring professionals have nowhere to go due to ths slow-down in retirements- http://tinyurl.com/24pma3b. Some authors are referring to this lack of Baby-boomer retirement as a workforce gridlock- http://tinyurl.com/2dmje5e
According to this article, 2010 started with 27.5 million workers over 55 and climbing- http://tinyurl.com/2f9p3h6 (Originally, workers over 55 were predicted to increase by 36.5% bet ’06 and ’16- http://tinyurl.com/28ndoyc). According to this article many AARP members plan to work past 65, which would indicate that this is not just a short term challenge. http://tinyurl.com/35thfz6
In addition to longer lives and better health than their parents, confidence in the financial markets seems to be a big driver in the Boomer retirement delay. Even as the economy returns, per this study older workers (who’ve seen the volatility of the market) are losing faith in their 401K’s financing a large percentage of their retirement- http://tinyurl.com/335brfl
So the question is . . . how to you keep an eager, aggressive and expectant bench of young professionals ready to take the reins of power engaged and satisfied? To address the resulting bottlenecks and other factors of work-life realities in the 21st century, many are advocating replacing the traditional corporate ladder climbing metaphor with one of an endless corporate lattice of opportunities that enable the workforce to move in any of many directions in search of ever-enriching experience http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/11/how_the_corporate_ladder_becam.html . In addition to this, some authors advise young professionals to add other related, but not official lattice experiences, such as becoming Employee Resource Group leaders- http://tinyurl.com/2fj9zjp










