Bronwyn Fryer on where the Boomers will find jobs

Here is an excerpt from article written by Bronwyn Fryer for the Harvard Business blog. To read the complete article, share it with others (e.g. unemployed or under-employed Boomers), check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Daily Alerts, please visit dailyalert@email.harvardbusiness.org.

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Where the Boomers Will Find Jobs

If you’re an older manager who’s been laid off (or is under threat), the future probably looks pretty bleak. Do you take a job at Walmart or work part time? You might lie awake at night and stare at the ceiling, asking yourself: What will happen to my family? My savings? My way of life?

You may also recall — with a bit of bitterness — all the rosy projections of think tanks and experts who predicted that there would be plenty of work for people in the baby boom generation going forward. For example, in 2004, HBR authors Ken Dychtwald, Tamara Erickson, and Bob Morison wrote a seminal article called “It’s Time to Retire Retirement” in which they argued that, given the imminent retirement of millions of boomers, “we’ve recently passed what will prove to be a historic low in the concentration of older workers. Just when we’ve gotten accustomed to having relatively few mature workers around, we have to start learning how to attract and retain far more of them.”

Sigh.

These projections were made before the Great Recession dried up millions of jobs and, simultaneously, retirement funds for people who once looked forward to their sunset years.

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Fryer introduces Barry Bluestone, Dean of the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs at Northeastern University, “with heartening news.” Bluestone, who has a serious track record in labor market analysis (and who carries a Medicare card himself), reiterates the findings of demographers like Dychtwald re where employment will be among least 5 million estimated potential job vacancies in the United States by 2018. (Bluestone’s research is one of four papers written by independent experts, all of which can be found at www.encore.org/research.

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Bronwyn Fryer is a contributing editor to Harvard Business Review.

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