The past four decades have seen major transformation in the roles and evolving responsibilities of employers   with regard to the lives of their employees. While business has changed with the ‘times,’ the times have been defined by the baby boomers. The boomers are the largest generation in the nation’s history – nearly 80 million people born between 1946 and 1964. The last 40 years in the workplace have been theirs. Today’s ‘accepted practices’ were yesterday’s revolutions brought to the workplace by their lifestyles, lifestages, and now, their longevity in the labor force.

For example, unlike their mothers, nearly 70 percent of boomer women work full or part-time. Flextime, to accommodate family needs, or to avoid congested highways is routine in many of America’s industry sectors. Worksite childcare centers are no  longer novel, but the norm. For those working in knowledge-based service jobs, telecommuting a day or more a week via the Internet is an accepted option for many. Rather than extraordinary, an array of benefits are now expected in most hiring packages, including retirement planning, acc ess to employee assistance programs, healthcare and dental coverage, life insurance, and more.

The boomers have at least another 20+ precedent-setting years in the workplace – how will they, now as older workers, shape the future workplace and the role of employers?

Business spends considerable sums of money to project economic trends, forecast technological change, or to see clearly through the haze of globalization and current events. Most of these investments are wrought with uncertainty, affected by unforeseen events and a mixture of good and bad luck. In contrast, demographics can be seen as destiny. With relative accuracy we can predict who is and will be in the labor force. According to the Current Population Survey (2000), there were 18.4 million workers age 55+ in the labor force. The Bureau of Labor Statistics forecasts that this number will grow to nearly 32 million by 2015.

Because of the baby boomers, business has enjoyed a well-educated, seemingly endless supply of workers for the past 40 years. However, unlike their parents, the boomers had fewer children. As the accompanying chart shows, there is a coming shortfall in the number of available workers after the large baby boomer cohort. Employers, in nearly all industry sectors, will be required to retain and seek older workers to maintain their expertise and in some cases simply to get work done. In a study conducted for the American Trucking Association it was reported that there is a current shortage of nearly 20,000 truck drivers. In only seven years, when the baby boomers will be between 50 and 68, the ATA estimates that demand for drivers will exceed supply by more than 5 times – a shortfall of nearly 110,000 employees (Global Insight, 2005).

As in their youth, older baby boomers will be a disruptive force driving change in the workplace. In response to a new older workforce, business must anticipate change in employee needs and in their roles as employers to meet the new realities of an older labor force. Four factors will shape employer recruitment, productivity, retention strategies over the next decade: the graying of the workforce; growing number of older women in the labor force; increasing demand of caregiving on employees; and, the evolving trend of multi-act careers for workers across the lifespan.

Gray Matters – As the boomers age, the workplace will be grayer – some grayer than others. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median age of the American workforce is about 41 year old, compared to 20 years earlier when it was nearly 36. Knowledge intensive industries are impacted the most by aging and retirement. For example, in engineering, petrol-chemical, utilities, defense manufacturing, education and healthcare, a workforce shortage is pending and older workers who form the collective gray matter that is the institutional memory of many organizations will retire. One report suggests that within the next 5 years, 8 in ten oil and gas companies forecast a shortage of engineers (Poretto, 2007). The Federal Government is predicting nearly 50 percent of the current workforce to retire over the next 10 years with critical losses in areas such as air traffic control (GAO, 2001; 2002).

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