The Knowledge Worker Nightmare

Kevin Coleman is a highly skilled senior level project and program manager/advisor with experience leading projects with labor budgets ranging from a few hundred thousand dollars to multi-million dollar budgets across multiple industries.

  Estimating   Knowledge Management   Lessons Learned   Strategy  

Today's organizations are faced with a unique challenge: how to try and slow down (or just delay) the brain drain as boomers begin to retire.

Publically released figures state that in the United States, about 10,000 baby boomers reach retirement age (62 or over) each and every day. This has many organizations concerned, and rightfully so. Analysis conducted on one organization clearly shows one method of estimating the risk associated with this issue. The organization has 23,500 workers and has revenues of $3.5 billion. The calculation is called revenue per employee or (RPE).

If you take the total revenues and divide it by the total number of employees, you see that the RPE is just about $149,000 per employee. You can perform a similar calculation substituting the profit for employee (PPE). The company had about $750 million profit of the above revenue, so the PPE would be about $33,000. The profit per employee is likely to decrease given many of these workers have considerable experience. That experience drives the overall value a worker provides to an organization and constitutes a big risk!

Now consider that many of the retirees fall into the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) categories, and now we must address the STEM aspects of baby boomer retirement. One estimate states that there are about 5 million native-born Americans with …

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