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 The nation's first baby boomer, Kathleen Casey-Kirschling, born one second after midnight on Jan, 1986, applied for Social Security benefits over the internet, signaling the start of what may be the most sweeping demographic changes to ever hit the American workforce. An estimated 10,000 people a day will become eligible for retirement over the next two decades, approximately one every seven seconds. Projections are that the Social Security trust fund will go broke in 2041. Of course, new taxes will be proposed to save the fund, but that presents the question of who will pay those taxes.
Many employment experts warn that there may not be enough younger workers to replace those who will retire and that even the massive productivity gains made in the past decade may not be enough to make up for the lost labor, talent, and knowledge base of the baby boomers. In fact, by 2010, more than 25 percent of the total U.S. working population will be at or near retirement age. The generation just behind them, sometimes referred to GenXers, with less than 54 million people, is 35 percent smaller.
Manufacturing already faces shortages of skilled workers in many sectors. This shortage will only intensify as the boomer generation of welders, tool and die makers, mechanics, and electricians begins retiring. However, as companies compete to attract the best of the GenXers, the biggest problem may be the loss of institutional knowledge. The Society of Petroleum Engineers estimates that the petroleum industry will lose 44 percent of its petroleum engineers between 2000 and 2010, a loss of 231,000 years of cumulative experience. That’s a lot of experience and knowledge from just one sector, and we can expect similar losses in every industry. Almost every expert agrees that the time to plan for knowledge loss is running out.
However, some innovative companies have already begun programs on two fronts. First, many companies are developing changes that address the problems inherent with older bodies through job-enhancing technologies to retain and estimated sixty-nine percent of baby boomers who might be willing and able to stay on the payroll. Second, to replace the talent and knowledge lost by the baby boomer exodus by identifying and documenting the knowledge and experience held by boomers before they exit the workplace. All companies with a goal of building a post-boomer high-performance workforce may need to take a “long-term investment” view of the value of job-specific training, employee development, knowledge documentation, and job-enhancing technologies.
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