Metric Four: Scope of Retirement Impact

Another flavor of pure prediction gauges the impacts of retirement on a department or functional skill area. This is especially useful in those areas with large numbers of highly skilled workers in niche areas. It is probably not enough for planning to understand that the organization will need to replace 50 percent of their engineering staff. There are many types of engineers, and the retiring engineers may have a skill set that a different type of newer engineer could fill.

Value. Analyzing the scope of impact on your skill sets within the company may assist managers in deciding how to manage the retirement wave best, precisely understanding what types of skills need to be replaced.

Audience. Senior managers and executives

Data Elements. Skill sets analysis/job title analysis. From your audit of key vulnerable areas, pick out the most vulnerable of the following data:

• The total number of predicted retirements in that skill.

• The total number of employees (currently) in that skill.

The exact size of the employee base with a skill will of course vary. Since it’s a forecast, there is no need to worry if you have no feel on what that job title/skill set will be staffed like in five years—it will not matter. Use current data to help give you the forecast.

Presentation. Presentation of this data can use a similar grid to the timeline (see Table 10.7). Where there are obvious red flag areas, it may be helpful to highlight them for managers to pick out exactly in a large list of data (red flag areas are shaded as an example).