This article is reprinted by permission from NextAvenue.org. Babies born in the U.S. today are likely to live to be 76, on average, compared with just 47 in 1900. By 2040, life expectancy in the U.S. will climb to 79.8 years, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle. The U.S. today has more 60-year-olds than 6-year-olds.
The country’s aging workforce requires organizations to develop ways to retain and retrain older workers. Organizations also need to find a way to turn older adults into customers: by one estimate, the global cohort of people 60 and over represents a $22 trillion market opportunity. Countries and organizations will have to address this remarkable demographic shift and learn to manage it going forward. However, few organizations seem to be focused on the aging workforce. Only an estimated 15% of organizations have a strategy that focuses on their aging workforce and a mere 4% have a retention strategy. To make matters worse, for every two experienced (also older) workers who leave the workforce, one inexperienced worker enters. And all of this was before the pandemic.Aging population, aging workforce This aging segment of society is not only in the U.S., but globally. It has been estimated that the fertility rate needed to maintain the present workforce is 2.1—that is, women need to have slightly more than two children, on average, to sustain the current size of the workforce. This number takes into consideration births, deaths, immigration and emigration. Several large countries in Asia and South America exceed that rate, as do most nations in sub-Saharan Africa, but none of the seven largest industrial countries, according to the World Population …