Workforce quality problems could lead to quantity woes
Toolbox
By JOEL DRESANG Milwaukee Journal Sentinel - Published: April 15, 2007
MILWAUKEE — This is how John Anderson dreamed of retirement: keeping a foot in his profession with a more abbreviated and flexible schedule so he has more time for church work and family.
Anderson, who's 60 and lives in Racine, Wis., retired in 2004 after 31 years as a financial executive at the S.C. Johnson family of companies. Since then, he has been working as a chief financial officer for smaller companies who hire him for two to four days a week through Milwaukee-based LauberCFOs.
"I've appreciated the flexibility," Anderson says.
Older workers such as Anderson have a marketable combination of experience, know-how and maturity, says John Lauber, president and chief executive officer of LauberCFOs, which hires out part-time financial consultants.
Organizers of a conference on the aging workforce identify LauberCFOs on the leading edge of tapping in to the value of older workers. As the baby boom — 78 million Americans born from 1946 to 1964 — becomes the retirement boom, both employers and the workers themselves need to start considering how to avoid a lapse in productivity, says Sammis White, director of the Center for Workforce Development at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
"One of the keys is recognizing that the world is changing," says White, whose center is running a conference Saturday aimed at helping workers make the transition to their retirement years. "After forty years of worker surpluses, we are entering a world of worker shortages, led by the impending retirement of many baby boom workers."
Some employers complain now about the quality of the workforce, but soon enough even more will be decrying the insufficient quantity, says Dennis Winters, chief economist for the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development.
Retaining and recruiting retirement-age talent will become an increasingly important strategy, Winters said.
"With fewer people to choose from, you have to look everywhere and find everybody you can, get them up to speed, and it's going to be in places that maybe you're not used to looking for for help," Winters says.
"If you want to maintain the output and the economic growth and things like that, you're going to have to look at a lot of taps now."
When Lauber launched his practice 20 years ago, he was a 30-something interested in hiring other 30-somethings. He lost his first two executives to clients who hired them away.
"I gravitated to older workers feeling that they had reached a point in their career where they understood that the grass was the same color on both sides of the fence," Lauber says. Over the years, he learned that by offering flexible situations, he could attract and keep experienced executives whose maturity made them more focused, attentive and resourceful than younger consultants.
"Because of the experience," Lauber says, "our people are better listeners than they might have been when they were in their 30s, and as such become a valued sounding board for the owners that they work with."
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