10,000 Boomers Reach Age 65 Everyday

About

Subscribe to my Podcast

Syndicate So Baby Boomer

Boomer Links

Advertising

Privacy Policy
We use third-party advertising companies to serve ads when you visit our website. These companies may use information (not including your name, address, email address, or telephone number) about your visits to this and other websites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you. For example, Google, as a third party vendor, uses a DART cookie to serve ads on this site based upon your visit to our sites and other sites on the Internet. You may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting Google ad and content network privacy policy at: www.google.com/privacy_ads.html. If you would like more information about this practice and to know your choices about not having this information used by these companies, please contact the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) at (207) 467-3500 or www.networkadvertising.org.

« Blogging Boomer Carnival #254 | Main | Blogging Boomer Carnival #255 »

10,000 Boomers Reach Age 65 Everyday

A joint poll by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) and AARP shows that U.S. employers are ramping up skills training and employee benefits aimed at closing skills gaps left when Baby Boomers retire, and at retaining and recruiting older workers.

In 2011, the oldest of the 77 million Baby Boomers began turning age 65---the traditional retirement age. That is why 72 percent of human resource professionals polled described the loss of talented older workers to be "a problem" or "a potential problem" for their organizations.

HR managers said that the actions their organizations have taken to prepare for the loss of talented older workers who retire include the following:

--- increased training and cross-training (45 percent);
--- developed succession planning (38 percent);
--- hired retired employees as consultants or temporary workers (30 percent);
--- offered flexible work arrangements (27 percent); and
--- designed part-time positions to attract older workers (24 percent).

The poll, which focused on strategic workforce planning, also asked human resource professionals to identify the greatest "basic skills" and "applied skills" gaps between workers age 31 and younger compared with workers age 50 and older.

--- Basic skills - more than half (51 percent) of human resource managers indicated they find older workers to have stronger writing, grammar, and spelling skills in English;
--- Applied skills - more than half (52 percent) of human resource managers said older workers exhibit stronger professionalism/work ethic.

Despite the proactive steps being taken, the SHRM-AARP poll finds that many U.S. organizations are largely unprepared for the brain drain and skills void that talented, retiring older workers will leave. Roughly 71 percent of those polled still have not conducted a strategic workforce planning assessment to analyze the impact of workers 50 and older who will leave their organizations.