What do you get when you combine years of wisdom and experience on the job with technology capable of transporting that wisdom and experience anywhere and anytime in HD sound and video plus a shrinking workforce? You get the Seniors Full Employment Act of the 21st Century. Here's how I think it's going to work.
Unless you just arrived here on the planet you have to know that somewhere around 2020 we are going to have a labor shortage of between 3 and 5 million workers. Big challenges here. Just when industry needs all the accumulated wisdom it can get to compete globally and the social entitlement systems like Medicaid and even Social Security need bigger contributors in terms of working adults, there will be a huge mismatch between the available talent and the demand for that talent.
A couple of forward thinking institutions are already preparing Boomers and their parents for life transitions issues like the one above. MetLife, the big insurance company (http://www.metlife.com/) and Civic Ventures (http://www.civicventures.com/) are offering 10/25K grants to schools that have programs to help Boomers retrain. With only about 20% of the Boomers having enough money to retire when they would like to and nearly 60% of the seniors needing some form of financial assistance as they go forward, it will be mandatory that both generations find ways to convert their expertise into capital.
Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte, N.C. (one of the largest community colleges in the country) is already instituting programs to retrain Boomers for second careers as they grapple with the dual needs of retirement accumulation and parent care through the Encore Program above (http://www.encore.org/ ) My prediction is that these courses will be springing up faster than retirement communities in the next few years.
Recently, on a trip to the airport, I had a new driver in the car service I use. He was a retired postal worker, who after, 30 years with the Postal Service, had taken retirement. It lasted about a month for him. He said he cut the yard, did the laundry, helped his wife straighten up the house, walked the dogs, and got the mail and the paper all before 11 am on Monday and then he spent the rest of the week bored. So, he went back to work.
We laughed together when I told him he was still driving for a living only now it was people and not catalogues. What we didn't laugh about was the fact that even with enough income to live on he still needed something more to do than sit around and wait for 25 or 30 years to pass.
You're here until you're not. Take a course, start a business, share some of your lifetime wisdom from getting up and going to work all those years. You'll like the last quarter of your life better and your family will too.
Did I mention that the world would be better off as well?
