Baby-boomer demographics continue to shape industry and employment.
According to Peter Coy with Bloomberg,”…older workers’ share of the workforce briefly dipped below 12 percent in the early 1990s but has risen steeply ever since. The population bulge of the baby boom is the big factor, of course. The peak birth year of the baby boom was 1957. Those peak boomers, no longer babies, reached age 55 in 2012—the first year older workers’ share of employment hit 21 percent.”
Babyboomer 55 BloombergAs managers we need to 

  • Understand that this cadre of talent has (is!) our tribal knowledge;
  • Find ways to help them share and preserve this knowledge;
  • Find new talent to learn from them;

One more item to think about- many baby-boomers will not be taking traditional retirements for various reasons-

  • They enjoy their jobs,
  • They are still too fit to “retire,”
  • They can’t afford to,
  • They decide to keep working to assure that they won’t run out of money when they finally do retire.

We will need to make some accommodations in our shops to keep them safe for older workers.
Bloomberg Story and Graph