July 2007

Succession Management
Boomers’ undereducated successors
need access to knowledge

Joe Pisciotto
Staff Writer

Retirements are expected to jump drastically by the middle of the next decade. The big question many company executives have on their minds is, who will replace these exiting baby boomers?

Will it be the retirees’ children and grandchildren? In some cases, yes. However, according to a May 7 article in The Wall Street Journal, immigrants (mainly Hispanic), children of immigrants, and blacks—people who have accounted for much of the population growth in the United States over the past couple decades—are the ones who will fill most of the void left by predominately white seniors.

Does this mean that the oft-discussed problem of succession management will be averted for the average U.S. business? Not exactly.

Two key issues remain: 1) retirements are still projected to greatly outpace workforce additions, and 2) many of the workers who will take over for retiring boomers lack sufficient education to match skill sets employers require. The first issue is still developing; it likely will be further shaped by macroeconomic and political policy. But managers and trainers should be considering what they can do about the second issue right now.

The Journal article went on to cite figures that show African-American and Hispanic children currently and will continue in the near term to graduate from high school at lower rates and read at lower proficiency than their white peers. Employers therefore face the great difficulty of finding highly skilled and educated workers to take the place of retiring boomers who occupy integral company positions.

Unfortunately, no easy or straightforward solution exists. However, proactive companies have the opportunity to get themselves ready for the imminent en masse retirement.

Training focused on native knowledge

Many older workers, especially those responsible for making key decisions, possess a vast storehouse of knowledge that will retire with them—unless companies seize the opportunity to harvest that knowledge.

While it is impractical, if not impossible, for companies to comprehensively gather and archive their employees’ institutional knowledge for future reference, it is well within every business leader’s grasp to facilitate the exchange of knowledge among employees.

As prospective boomer replacements enter the workforce in the next few years, companies have the unique opportunity to offer training programs that ask employees to, in effect, train one another, thereby allowing older, more experienced workers to pass along vital knowledge to their younger counterparts.

This sort of knowledge transference can only happen in a challenging, collaborative training environment. People learn best when they work with peers who possess different skill sets. Such collaboration challenges individuals to rely on others and come up with unique solutions to everyday, work-related problems.

Unlike traditional one-way training that attempts to passively inject trainees with detached information, collaborative training encourages an exchange of contextualized knowledge that most employees will readily transfer to their everyday jobs.

With this type of training program, you will harvest and preserve the vital knowledge your experienced workers possess and also set the stage for a more participative, collaborative, successful workplace into the future.

Coaching

While getting employees to teach one another pays huge dividends, the best company leaders also play a large role in directly assisting their employees.

Leaders often become leaders because they are knowledgeable and because they know how to move people. Because they know what makes people tick, they are in the unique position to serve as conduits of knowledge and skill in the workplace—in other words, coaches.

Leaders as coaches serve as mentors. They help their people focus on strengths, overcome weaknesses, and develop long-term, attainable goals.

Coaches will play an integral role as boomers retire and less skilled workers move in. While significant knowledge transference can be facilitated through good training programs, coaches will be the ones who help inexperienced employees both make key transitions and establish solid frameworks in which to successfully operate.

Schooling

Coaching and training are excellent methods for developing and transferring knowledge within an organization, but classroom education is also important in that it gives individuals a generally accepted base of information that they can use professionally.

If the Journal article is correct in that much of the upcoming workforce will be less educated than their predecessors, companies will find it especially important to encourage their workers to seek further education.

As an incentive for their employees to take advanced courses or brush up on particular skill areas, companies can offer to pay for some or all of their tuition.

The danger always exists that employees will get educated and then leave their job shortly thereafter, thus sticking the tuition-paying company with a bill and no benefits. While that is one possible outcome, an education incentive will usually help attract better employees in the first place and potentially secure long-term loyalty.

Certainly, there’s no silver bullet for dealing with the unprecedented number of retirements on the horizon, but a shift in focus to account for employees’ impending need for knowledge can help companies adapt as they would to any other challenge.