Good News for Boomers: Labor Shortage by 2018

Baby Boomers who want to ease into retirement over the next decade with a post-career period of a reduced work load may find plenty of opportunity to do just that. A parsing of employment and demographic trends between 2008 and 2018 concludes that Boomer retirees who want to keep working will likely be in demand.

I know it seems a bit crazy to be talking about a labor shortage right about now, when the more pressing issue is how to hold onto a job, or how to navigate your way out of unemployment and into a new job. But if you push your focus out a decade or so there's an interesting dynamic brewing that may indeed be very good news for Baby Boomers who will be ready to shift into a less-demanding post-career "retirement" job.

The Coming Labor Shortage. Really.
Okay, this takes a bit of long-term thinking to imagine, but the premise is pretty simple: Post-Boomer generations are too small to sop up all the available jobs our economy will be generating. Northeastern University professor Barry Bluestone and Mark Melnik, a Ph.D candidate at Northeastern, took a look at demographic and job forecast data and conclude:

When the nation comes out of the current jobs recession - and this may take two to three years - we will begin to see spot shortages in labor markets. If the economy continues to improve, the spot shortages will become more general, and we will experience the shortages our research projects. By 2018, with no change in current labor force participation rates or immigration rates and an expected return to healthy economic growth, we will have more jobs than people to fill them.

Ready for your Encore?

The academics say it could be upwards of 5 million jobs that go wanting for a warm body. That's promising news for older Americans who are angling to downshift into a post-career routine that will still include some work. In fact, the focus of Bluestone and Melnik's research was on what this could mean to aging Baby Boomers. The subtitle of their report sums it up: The Coming Labor Shortage and How People in Encore Careers Can Help Solve It (PDF).

The academics surmise that a lot of job demand will be in encore-friendly fields such as teaching and every nook-and-cranny of health care. Moreover, they envision a job market in which the tables are turned about 180 degrees from what we're dealing with today:

Instead of workers jockeying for jobs by enhancing their skills to gain the approval of employers, we may find that employers are forced to find ways to enhance their jobs to attract older workers to fill them. Not only will there be jobs for these experienced workers to fill, but the nation will absolutely need older workers to step up and take them-to assure continued economic growth and to provide the critical social and government services on which we all depend.

That's a whole lot of welcome news here at the Retirement Beat. Amid all the gloom and doom of how we've saved too little and lost too much, it's great to see that there may indeed be a way to work our way into the comfortable retirement we have long envisioned.

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