Skilled employees – or ‘Talent’ – are getting harder and harder to find. And the age of current employees with that expertise and experience is growing older and older.
The ‘Talent Cliff’ is a term that is circulating out there to describe the challenge that is coming where that skilled and experienced talent will be retiring from the workforce.
The Stats
In terms of numbers:
- The median age of employees in the workforce is 41.7 years old
- With the current world population of 8 billion people:
– 33% are under the age of 20
– 4% are between the age of 20 to 39
– 23% are between the age of 40 to 59
– 7% are between the age of 60 to 79
– 9% are between 80 and 99
– 8% are over 100
- Roughly 28% of the world’s population is between 45 and 70 years of age yet they make up 44.8% of the employee base for companies
- In North America, 9.4% of those between 16 and 24 are unemployed yet, only 2.6% of those 45 to 70 years of age are unemployed
The numbers tell the story we already know. Our top talent is getting old and are holding too big of a percentage of the jobs in the workforce. And, there does not seem to be very many forward thinking leaders out there that are planning for and developing talent for the future.
The Talent Cliff
The Talent Cliff will leave multiple organizations without experience and skills. A.I. will fill some of the void left by an aging workforce retiring but it won’t make up for it all.
As a leader you have a choice… you can play the short game and carry on the way you have been or you can shift your focus to the long game and build your team or business to last.
How? Good question. Here is how I am approaching it:
- Hire the very best people in terms of culture fit and attitude. Hiring people solely based on their skills is a disaster. People with great attitudes can be taught any other skill and they tend to be WAY more loyal to customers, other team members and the company.
- Train and develop. Invest in programs that develop young talent for the future. Include your senior people in helping to develop your talent of the future. Build a program where senior talent is recognized for being teachers of future talent so that they don’t feel threatened and think they are training their replacements. Even better, incentivize your senior people to hang around after retirement on a part-time basis as mentors, coaches and trainers.
- Invest in systems and structure. Building replicable structure, processes and systems that enable you to serve customers better, increase productivity and cut costs used to be so you scale and make more profit. Moving forward, it is going to enable you to do all of that plus thrive with less people.
- Can A.I. help? No one knows the answer to that yet – however, when the internet and social media first arrived, no one how to use that to their benefit either. The same holds true for A.I. It will become more clear as to how it will provide value to you. Don’t ignore it.
The Talent Cliff is coming. Don’t ignore it. Plan and execute for it while your competitors are sleeping.
Robert Murray is a Vancouver, BC based Business Strategy Consultant, #1 Best Selling Author, International Keynote Speaker, and TEC Top Speaker of the Year for 2018. For further advice, insight and inspiration on how to unlock your inner leader, connect with Robert on LinkedIn.
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Tags:
Corporate Leadership,
Effective Leadership,
Generations in the Workplace,
Leadership Challenges,
Leadership Development,
Leadership Today,
Robert Murray,
Robert S. Murray
