Not too long ago we were all worried about a looming labor crisis. We were worried how there weren't enough people to fill the jobs about to be vacated by retiring Baby Boomers. Remember? That was just before the meltdown of the housing industry causing unemployment to jump to 5% overall in the US. But the problem of the post Baby Boomer Blues (PBB) isn't going away.
The symptoms of PBB is not just having to work hard to find and retain enough qualified bodies to do work. It's also about figuring out how to retain access to the knowledge and experience getting ready to walk out the door. One very direct method of doing this is to try to hang onto retiring employees for just a little longer by giving them a diagonal promotion into a support function like IT or HR. This provides the experienced employee with a new challenge and a "cushy" assignment while allowing them to spread the gospel of their years of industry and company experience.
This strategy had a much higher potential of producing value when the company operated primarily in a homogenous domestic environment. But globalization has changed all of that. Now, trying to deploy a standardized IT environment or a single ethics training program across a global organization is radically more complicated. What's more, as competition increases at the local level, delivering flexible, customized services is critical for competitive advantage. These jobs are not cushy anymore. They are critical and strategic and require trained experts who really know what they are doing.
It is certainly true that support function leadership needs to understand the business. It is certainly true that retiring employees have a wealth of knowledge to offer the business. But trying to kill these two birds with one stone is much harder now that companies are executing global strategies and competing in multiple legal, cultural and business environments. Better to look at both sides of this equation as a separate knowledge management problem:
* Provide mentoring and industry education for the qualified
leaders running your support operations
* Provide a lessons learned and knowledge capture program which
targets your top performers throughout their tenure with the company
Oh, and by the way, the time to implement these programs is now. Before the job market heats back up and your managers are scrambling to hold onto knowledge assets that are ready to walk out the door and go fishing.
Christopher Rivinus
Leader of Knowledge Systems, Enterprise KM
PB
1 Penn Plaza, Ste. 200
New York, NY 10119
www.pbworld.com
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