Reprinted with permission from www.jobs.com

Good news for working adults! You may have more options than you think! To stay competitive organizations have spent the last decade focused on the three R’s of: re-engineering, restructuring, and re-alignment. This has created massive change and chaos for employers. Moving into 2000 organizations are facing a challenging but vastly different set of R’s – recruitment, retention, and retraining. Revolutionary forces worldwide are converging to forever alter the way we work and age. These are: (1) our dramatically changing population demographics in a time of expanding labor force growth, and (2) the rapid shift from major manufacturing using muscle and machine to information - capitalizing mainly on mind and technology and, consequently, the changing personality and skills necessary to succeed in this workplace. These two forces will dictate both organizational and individual destinies. It is imperative for both employer and employee to swiftly implement innovative career management strategies vastly different from the past decade. Resulting new realities are the increasing demand for trained labor combined with a shortage of workers between ages 24–45. In the next decade this will create a 30% labor shortage according to the consulting firm of Walton Wyatt Worldwide. More than 13 million high-tech workers will be needed, providing greater leverage for high-performing workers of all ages, according to the Trend newsletter (3/4/99). Our labor force of about 140 million will grow 11% by 2006 but the demand will increase by 19%. An American Management Association survey reported that 60% of companies surveyed said that recruiting and retaining qualified workers would be their major problem in 2000. The war for talent is on! Some employers anticipating a serious labor shortage in their future are beginning to revamp and adopt creative strategies such as stock plans, sign-on pay, bonuses, profit-sharing, and variable compensations to recruit and retain employees. The retirement of the Baby Boomers should be a scary prospect for employers, given the birth dearth of the Generation Xers and the shrinking numbers of the generations that follow. Even more alarming is the documentation in 1992 by the US Department of Education that almost 50% of Americans in their early 20’s, and 14–16% of college graduates, were functionally illiterate, unable to read a map or balance a checkbook. As the United States and other developed countries throughout the world experience the aging of their populations and consequently their workforces, there is a growing need to recognize the special economically advantageous characteristics of this older workforce cohort. However, ironically, according to a survey by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) and the AARP, only 65% of the organizations actively recruit older workers. Ageism, though illegal in the US, is a reality. The high-tech industry has a 17% unemployment rate for workers over the age of 50. Fortune Magazine in 1999 featured an article "Finished at 40" which reflects the view of many employers in the IS industry. The key to private business success and continued productivity growth will be retaining well-educated mature individuals in the workforce and actively training and retraining them as appropriate. To avoid being unprepared for their workforce needs, many policies and practices that discourage employment of mid-career and older workers must be changed. As a start, it is critical for organizations and individuals to realize that our current retirement paradigm based on chronological age, especially strong since WWII, is passé and potentially destructive. Altering this, however, involves rethinking and shattering our all-too-common but deeply held negative attitudes and outdated belief barriers. Leonard Hayflick, author of How and Why We Age, a foremost researcher on aging, says that what the general public believes about aging is a mixture of folklore, surmise, unsubstantiated connections and downright false information. The prevailing assumption that one’s chronological age automatically spells decline and decay is not supported absolutely by reliable research but a generally accepted stereotype. Gerontology, the study of aging, is a relatively new science, long ignored and only now gaining credibility. Until recently, this research on aging has focused on five to ten percent of the older population who are diseased and sick. It’s much like early psychology when researchers studied only the mentally ill and youth up to age 21 years old, ignoring the healthy adults in the stages of later life. Only now is attention being turned to the 90% of the healthy aging population which will increase dramatically as the Baby Boomers join these ranks. The following are myths related to aging to be re-examined. Mentally: Shrinking brain is a given. Brain power peaks at 17 and then it’s all downhill. Neurons are depleted by age 60 if they last that long. A recent study led by Rotman Research and the University of Toronto reported in Science Daily (10/28/99) that older adults can perform just as well as young adults on visual, short-term memory lists, but they use different areas of the brain than younger people. They concluded that the older brain is more resilient than formerly thought. It is a muscle: use it or loose it! Alzheimer’s and senility are diseases, not a natural part of aging, as taught in graduate schools in the early 1970s. Physically: Growing up means running down and to be old is to be sick and frail. Jack LaLane, fitness expert, at age 85 is as fit as the average 29 year-old, as reported in the Johns Hopkins Medical Newsletter. Psychologically: Little to live for, quietly waiting for the grim reaper. Hemingway called retirement the ugliest word in the English language. Chopra said "the early retirement death syndrome is created by the belief that one’s life is over and that medical problems dramatically increase the first two years after retirement". Creativity: Wilting inventiveness is a part of aging. This assumption based on a study by Liehman in 1953 holds a very narrow view of creativity and is still cited in books today. In 1957 the University of Michigan held a series of monthly seminars on creativity attended by the great minds of the time: Maslow, Mead, Rogers and May. With their definition of creativity, age was not considered an issue. Older workers can be our best source of future workers. At least 80% of the Baby Boomers say they want to remain in the workplace and only about 25% can afford to retire. Realize that today we will be spending almost 20 years in retirement as compared to 1.7 years in 1900. There is plenty of time for another career to keep us productive. So what are companies actually doing to keep older workers past retirement? The survey by AARP and the SHRM found that: About 68% have programs for hiring retirees as consultants or temp workers. About 50% provide skills training. Only 28% reduce pay and responsibilities. Less than 18% have "phased retirement," shortened work week, temporary work or working from home. Astonishingly, only 10% provide alternative career tracks – re-careering within the company – which could be the most promising program. Ironically, there are no valid studies that document that older workers are less productive but these assumptions are still active. After years of focused research, Salthouse and Maurer summarized in the 1996 edition of the Handbook of the Psychology of Aging that there is no direct relationship between age, ability, and job performance if the latter is determined by knowledge, skills, abilities. Another set of three R’s for our future workplace, more appropriate to our current needs, would be to adapt a recycling or a seed model focusing on retraining, re-careering, and renewing. In summary, absolutely no reliable research validates that chronological is the best way to determine our real age. Facing the realization that because of lifestyle changes and medical discoveries, adults will be healthy at least 20 years longer, employers and employees should adopt the following anti-aging steps: Stop the chronological clock now. Take the extra 20 years of healthy life. Insert it in as a second mid-life. Deduct 20 years from current chronological age. Do what you would do if you were 20 years younger. Forget chronological and focus on functional age: how one actually performs and produces on the job, which can have little to do with chronological age. This is the non-conventional wisdom necessary to create a new way to age and work in the 21st century. jobs.com/resources/helen_harkness_work.asp?intTopNav=1

Reprinted with permission from www.jobs.com




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