One Year!

No Link, no story Just a Happy birthday to us.

It has been one full year of baby boomer hating and baby boomer antics. Nothing to see here today. Just move along.

Enjoy the day knowing that the boomers are one year closer to death.

Boomer Brain Drain? Or Career Opportunity?

I know we talk about the impending social security crisis that is coming when the boomers retire but every cloud has a silver lining.

What is that cloud for us? Jobs! From CFO.COM:

The long-dreaded era of Baby Boomer retirements has finally dawned, and with the oldest Boomers turning 62 this year, the fallout may reach epic proportions in the early years of the next decade. The impact on corporate well-being will be most severe in the senior executive ranks, which are chock-full of people in their 50s and 60s who, unlike most others in their generation, can afford to retire.
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That means many companies will be hard-pressed to shore up their finance functions with leaders as experienced as those they have had until now. At Fortune 500 companies, about half of senior managers are expected to retire in the next five years, according to Jay Jamrog, senior vice president of research at The Institute for Corporate Productivity, which researches social, political, legal, economic, and other trends on behalf of its members, mostly large corporations. At the same time, there will be fewer people to replace them with. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that over the next 10 years there will be a 15 percent decline in workers age 35 to 54, concurrent with a 25 percent increase in demand.

I wonder if big business can figure out how to send a management desk job to India. I bet they'll try. Can you imagine getting that memo about the TPS cover sheet from someone in a foreign country?

I don't think that will work. So what does that mean?

Now there will be job openings. All those years that we couldn't move up because there were baby boomers with their increasingly larger asses stuck in the seat. You couldn't pry them out. But now they will be leaving.

And one of the few perks of being gen-x will come into play. There aren't enough of us.

So that means good paying jobs. Of course, it's to bad the social security tax will kill us.

Here's a bit more:

Most disturbing is that there seems to be no great solution to the problem, let alone an ideal one. "Nobody's got any good plans for replacing people or keeping them longer," Jamrog told CFO.com. "What kind of lure can you provide for a senior executive who can afford retirement? Keeping them on as mentors is a very good idea, but how do you do that?"

Indeed, in a 2006 study by the Society of Human Resources Management, only about a quarter of the 1,232 respondents said their employers were offering employment options designed to attract and retain semi-retired workers, and 62 percent were not even planning any action on this front. The numbers were similar for "changing retirement policies and plans as a result of projected demographic changes." And almost 70 percent said they had no plans to try to bring back former executives as mentors.

I times of old companies had management training programs. You were on some sort of development path while you worked at a company. But that is an expense, so, baby boomer run businesses cut those out to save money. Now, no one is there to step in. And, true to form, the short sighted boomers are still not planning ahead.

As you might recall it was baby boomer computer programmers that brought us Y2K. That's how good they are at planning ahead.

Losing any top talent is bad enough, but corporations face the very real fact that they will lose a majority of their top talent in a very short time span. "It's one thing if you're the CEO and you bring in a new CFO but your heads of sales, marketing, and operations are still there," said de Wetter. "But if you have three of your five top leaders all leaving within a year, that's an enormous change."

Yeah, a change for the better.