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Baby Boomers Affect Employment-----by Fred St Laurent While the current federal unemployment rate is 5% and 200,000 were newly employed last month, this number will have little meaning within 5 to 10 years as there will be 77 million baby boomers that will be retiring within the next 5 to 10 years. Along with other employers, the leasing industry should begin preparing for this now as it will take time to implement, and those who take action now, will be more competitive in the near future. The graph below is dramatic!
No matter which economic projections come true, the demographic challenges ahead are inescapable: There will be a sharp slowdown in the number of people entering the workforce. Business Week Today: “Some economists making projections decades out assume a 1.5% productivity-growth rate--the average over past 30 years--and conclude that the U.S. could be short by as many as 10 million workers by 2010. No matter which economic projections come true, the demographic challenges ahead are inescapable: There will be a sharp slowdown in the number of people entering the workforce. Since 1980, the U.S. workforce exploded by 50%, adding some 38 million people as baby boomers hit their prime and as women flooded into the workforce. Now, baby boomers are aging and nearly 80% of women hold jobs outside the home. By 2020, the labor force is set to grow just 16%, adding fewer than 20 million new workers, according to Ellwood's projections.” This is only a small part of the problem!! There is also a trend in most companies that can only be referred to as a “revolving door” employment situation. According to the 2004 U.S. Job Recovery and Retention Survey released by the Society for Human Resource Management and CareerJournal.com, 38% percent of the human resource professionals surveyed said they have noticed an increase in turnover since the beginning of 2004. So the dynamic is that there will be fewer people to fill more jobs. Today it is difficult to retain the employees that we have hired. This labor shortage is the reason noted management guru Peter Drucker said: “…demographics; not productivity or IT or knowledge management, will be Corporate America's greatest challenge of the next 20 years.” So what do we do about it? Of course I am happy because it seems that Recruiting will play a strategic role in the acquisition of talent from competing companies as the war for qualified employee's heats up. The only defense against a targeted recruiting effort is keeping your employees happy. So how does one do this? According to Marc Bailey, the CMO of Taming Turnover, consultants and experts in employee retention: “Nothing is more crucial to your organization's competitiveness than hiring the right people and keeping them. $420 billion was lost to the U.S. economy in 2004 due to turnover. That's a lot of money. But the most devastating cost of turnover is the damage to customer relations, to employee morale, and the knowledge that walks out your door and into the offices of the competition” Marc also feels that “…people join companies but they leave managers” and when I first heard him say this it struck me as being extremely relevant because most of the people that we recruit out of one company to our clients company, are usually leaving because of issues that have developed from disappointment with management. Marc's company ( http://www.tamingturnover.com ) partners with their clients to train managers to be what Marc calls “retention focused champions” and has an online university for this purpose that is surprisingly affordable and sophisticated. They say they will improve the effectiveness of every manager-leader and develop in them new core competencies with lasting results aimed at Trust- Flexibility- and Caring. This is one of the proactive plans being implemented to prepare for the unavoidable dynamics of the “baby boomer” generation retirement. Over all it is my opinion that whatever anyone does to plan their business for the next five to ten years, they should address the issues of Turn Over and Retention. Kind Regards, Fred St Laurent "Impacting Companies one person at a time." Website: http://www.sfbirecruiter.com/ Member of ELA Member of NAELB Member of the Leasing News Advisory Board http://www.leasingnews.org/Advisory%20Board/Fred_St_Laurent.htm (Leasing News both accepts and encourages articles that will interest other readers in our industry.) |
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