Baby Boomers

Workforce and Employment Issues

Aging Boomers have changed the way that aging workers are treated and viewed in the workplace. Characterized as “reliable, compassionate, and honest” by the website Baby Boomer Care, Boomers have forced many companies to rethink policies on work scheduling, retention, and recruitment; these range from flexibility in hours to job sharing, postretirement reemployment, and consulting. According to Eve Tahmincioglu, an estimated 69% of Boomers will spend their retirement years at work, delaying collecting Social Security or serving as mentors to new employees, who may have to take on roles they might previously have had an opportunity to grow into over a decade or more, potentially compromising productivity, quality, or safety.

Boomers are also seen as essential to successful transfer of leadership and authority to subsequent generations (commonly referred to as GenXers and Millennials) and, through interaction with newer employees, are learning new styles of communication, use of social media, how to work as a team, and how to use a wide range of technology. Casey Hawley found that Boomers provide benefits to many organizations and their coworkers because of their ability to take a long-term view, to overcome short-term downturns, to suppress negativity, to manage interoffice politics, and to negotiate better than their junior colleagues. Whereas newer generations of employees may demonstrate teamwork and social media savvy, Boomers model accountability and personal responsibility.

For those Boomers who wish to remain employed, career change is a viable option, as many spent more or part of their work life doing jobs that helped them survive as opposed to thrive. Among top employment opportunities are management analysts, postsecondary educators, logisticians, general and operations managers, and other medical, therapeutic, and health services professionals. Emerging employment areas include [Page 106]environmental technologies (green technologies) and energy industries as well as applications of environmental sustainability policies in many areas, such as housing.

Housing

One example of an area that is influenced by trends among Baby Boomers is housing. Dowell Myers and Sungho Ryu trace the impact of this generation on the housing market, where the economic recession during the early years of the new millennium demonstrated the impact that 78 million Boomers had on the price of homes (85% of the available inventory is existing homes) after dominating the real estate market for 30 years. Implications of downsizing, relocation, transportation, and myriad issues concern planners, real estate professionals, and providers of support services for aging Boomers.

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