Are you worried about the supposedly inevitable brain drain that’ll follow the retirement of the Baby Boomers? If you’re in these industries, maybe you should be.
According to Ken Ball and Gina Gotsill, authors of Surviving the Baby Boomer Exodus, these fields are likely to feel the absence of older workers more than others:
- oil and gas producers
- manufacturers
- educational institutions
- health care, and
- government.
Young people aren’t going into the oil and gas industry because of lifestyle preferences, according to Ball and Gotsill — the time spent away from home is a turnoff.
Manufacturing suffers from image problems — young people describe working in manufacturing as a “life sentence” on a never-ending assembly line.
And the workforces in education, health care and government jobs are skewed heavily toward older workers, the authors say, because they’re the kinds of jobs people tend to stay in a long time. Thus, when the Boomers retire, the sheer number of vacancies will be bring huge headaches for hiring managers in those industries.
Is the ‘crisis’ real?
The first Baby Boomers turn 65 in 2011. But how many of them will actually retire?
We’ve heard reports that there are now more workers over 65 than there are teenagers in the labor force — the first time that’s happened since the feds began keeping track of such things in 1948.
That seems to reflect what many forecasters have been predicting over the past couple of years: Older workers just aren’t retiring in the traditional numbers.
Between retirement savings accounts going in the toilet due to recession to an older workforce that’s healthier — and more interested in staying active — than earlier generations, turning 65 is no longer seen as the career-ending benchmark.
Are you making plans to deal with the Baby Boomer exodus? Or do you think the dire “brain drain” predictions are alarmist? Tell us in the Comments section below.
