Boomer Entrepreneurial Collaboration

This Article appeared in Money Magazine (Dec 2006) by Pat Regnier, Senior Editor

Boomers and retirement: Trouble ahead!

Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research has surveyed employers, and they predict that half of their Boomer workers won’t be financially ready to retire at the traditional age. Not surprisingly, many of the employers also say that a big chunk of those Boomers will want to keep on working.

Working after the age of 65 can make a lot of financial sense. If you can do it, that is. I wrote a fairly upbeat article about delayed retirement a year ago, but the more I reflect on it–and the more reporting I do on this beat–the more skeptical I am that employers will happily welcome older workers as more Boomers hit their 60s. Management gurus and HR consultants often warn of a coming labor shortage, but of course it’s their job to scare employers into thinking they’ll need help finding good workers. As I wrote last year: “Peter Cappelli, an economist at Wharton, does think more older workers will stay on the job. But, he notes, hiring them won’t be the only option for employers. Just behind the busters [the smaller group of workers born after the Baby Boom] is a huge group of new workers: the boomers’ own kids. And taking on older folks is just one way for companies to deal with a tight labor market; they might invest more in technology or ship jobs to Bangalore.”

Beyond the macroeconomics, there’s the human factor. I’ve talked to lots of laid-off professionals in their 50s and 60s, and they complain that its hard to get younger managers to take them seriously. This is particularly tough on the most accomplished people, such as those who have run departments or even entire companies. There are only so many positions near the top of the pyramid, and once you get knocked off it’s hard to climb back on. Meanwhile, you’ve spent the past 15 or 20 years focusing on management tasks, so your technical skills (which you’ll need to find work lower down on the pyramid) might have grown stale. And even if they haven’t, age discrimination is common enough that you won’t get the credit you deserve for what you can do.

The growing importance of technology at work, and the breathtaking pace of technological change, may only make this worse. I’m just 35 and relatively tech-savvy–hey, kids, I’m blogging!–but I often feel like there’s a huge gap between myself and people in their 20s. I struggle to get my head around new Web applications such as social networking, and I’m sort of amazed and often a bit disgusted by the ability of the young’uns to multitask. Not long ago, and to my mild shame, I lost my temper with someone who, on the phone, sounded youngish, and clearly was both reading emails and finishing up a conversation with someone else on a cell phone. (In my day, phones connected to walls and we had to talk to one person at a time… and we liked it!) So how am I going to do fifteen years from now, when all of the kids coming out of college have communication chips implanted in their skulls and nobody gets my Dana Carvey references anymore?

Wait… that last part has already happened!!!!

The Boomer Blogger