At an early morning AARP seminar at the Marriott Downtown Providence last week, Christopher Davis was reviewing a pile of handouts, trying to get a feel for what it’s going to be like when he, a 53-year-old baby boomer, applies for a job.
“I’m currently out of work, but I’ve been working for [more than] 20 years,” Davis said. He worked at Select Comfort Corp. and Sears Portrait Studio. “But it’s a different arena than when I first started trying to get employed.”
The resources he needs to acclimate himself to a Web-based application process are out there to find, he said, “but every click is a new adventure to either something that I’d forgotten about or never knew.”
So Davis had come to see local business leaders and AARP representatives discuss what the future will hold for him and his contemporaries. The hour-and-a-half session – dubbed “Experience Matters” – was sponsored by Providence Business News and co-sponsored by the R.I. Society of Human Resource Managers.
Keynote speaker and AARP National Consultant Edwin A. Redfern Jr. agreed with Davis’s assessment of how tough
it might be for baby boomers to get hired in a digital age, but he said they should be valued workers. One of the biggest concerns that AARP has identified is that those employees – about one-third of employees will be older than 50 years old by 2010 – could all retire soon.
“What would happen if all the boomers just got up and left?” he asked during a quick role-playing exercise. He added, “That’s what’s happening. Pretend you’re a [human-resource] professional and all of a sudden, half your sales team, half your drivers leave. Half your IT folks leave.”
Employers should be concerned about how to retain the knowledge, experience and interpersonal “soft skills” that baby boomers have learned within the company, he said.
Brandon Melton, LifeSpan senior vice president and director of human resources, said LifeSpan has a plan that calls for four older nurses to teach classes at the Community College of Rhode Island. Realizing that their work force will need to change, LifeSpan has developed a forecast of what work force demands and employee availability will be in 2025, said Melton. Demand for health care is going to be higher than ever, he said, but the shortage of health care workers is going to continue to grow.
The hospital has taken other steps to counter that – including a summer program that during the last two years has started health care career training for about 160 high school students.
R.I. Department of Labor & Training Director Sandra Powell added that Rhode Island’s work force is projected to grow 6.7 percent between 2005 and 2015. During the same period, the amount of 55-to-64-year-old workers will grow 31.4 percent. The amount of 16-to-24-year-old workers will grow only 4.9 percent.
“So I think from a business perspective, older workers might not be able to retire as early as they had expected,” she said, adding that businesses are going to have to attract the knowledgeable older workers in “a way that is meaningful to that working population.”
SHRM State Director and Concordia Fibers & Concordia Medical HR Manager Nancy A. Roderick outlined that company’s shift toward medical manufacturing, which required investing in and retraining older employees.
For Davis, who was wondering about techniques he’ll need to know to get hired, he was happy to see that there’s an interest in his experience.
“I came here for a different purpose, but [it’s refreshing to] realize there is an initiative here to essentially get more out of workers,” he said.
Another attendee, 58-year-old David Lai, started Allied Metal Finishing in Providence and ran the company for about 17 years. But he sold the company recently and earned a degree in biotechnology from the University of Rhode Island. While some baby boomers will be staying on where they work now, others, like Lai and Davis, will be looking to start a career in a new industry.
“I’m going to be working until I drop dead,” Lai said, smiling. •
