The Pending Retirement Boom
The question isn't at what age I want to retire, it's at what income. George Foreman
The market has been hearing stories about the coming retirement boom for years now. Many boomers have been holding off their retirement due to the global recession brought on by a liquidity crisis and the bursting of the U.S housing bubble. The recession wiped out large portions of many boomers’ retirement investments and created an incentive for boomers to stay in the job market longer than originally planned. Now that the economy is seeing continued growth in the finance sector, the housing market, and increased hiring, boomers are starting to extricate themselves as soon as finances permit.
This pending retirement boom creates some dilemmas for HR leadership. Many firms have held off on hiring over the past few years, creating talent gaps. Firms have highly skilled and tenured, and expensive boomers, and need to fill the talent gaps with less experienced and younger employees. Firms have to actively plan for and respond to a brain drain of significant institutional knowledge in order to protect the future of the business.
While some firms are able to keep key boomers on payroll as consultants post retirement, this solution can be too expensive to maintain for many businesses, and leadership needs to remain agile and able to respond to the changing demands of the market. A strategic solution of identifying the future knowledge gap and planning for a progressive knowledge transfer often times is the better long term solution.
Join HCI July 31, 2013 at 12:00pm EDT for the webcast, Assessing and Addressing Organizational Knowledge Loss Risks and hear Jodi Wadel, Director of Journey Management of American Water, review her firm’s experience in engaging the problem head on. Learn how the dedication of significant resources to develop a system to proactively identify and address critical at-risk knowledge across all departments protected the long term strategic interests of the firm. Wadel and Brian Lester, Senior Consultant of EDSI Consulting, will also debate the spectrum of options available for firms to mitigate the risk.