The ‘Silver Tsunami’ is coming. Here’s what it means for your career

The Great Resignation… the Big Quit… the Great Realization…

Whatever you called it, the pandemic heralded a seismic shift in how American workers viewed and approached work and their careers.

Instead of clinging to a job for life, millions in gainful employment decided to hand in their two week’s notice, without an offer for a new job or even a long term plan for their future, and see what happened next.

3 jobs hiring across the U.S.

What happened next was economic instability, record-breaking inflation and mass layoffs (particularly in the tech sector), meaning having a job became more pressing than ever.

Four years on from the halcyon days of an abundance of jobs up for grabs—in July, the number of job openings in the U.S. fell to a 3.5 year low—the pendulum has firmly swung back in favor of employers.

The Great Resignation has made way for the so-called Great Stay, with knowledge-based workers now remaining in their current jobs for longer. However the fact remains that a labor shortage is looming.

Not okay, Boomer

While that might not make sense on the surface, with 76 million Baby Boomers getting ready to retire, the U.S. faces a substantial shortage of workers for decades to come.

“It would be tempting to think that the storm has passed—with ‘The Great Resignation’ over, the labor market will return to business as usual. But this wasn’t the storm itself; it was only a precursor to the real thing,” a new report by Lightcast states.

“The retirement of the Baby Boomers is a structural change, not a cyclical one, and the declining labor force participation of younger generations will be difficult to reverse.”

Additionally, job posting data shows that there is a high demand across many critical industries, and there is already a demand for more workers, more than the U.S. is projected to gain in the coming years.

This will be felt most acutely in the next five years, primarily in the healthcare and construction industries.

All growth in the labor force since 2019 can be attributed to foreign-born workers and although the working-age population is expected to grow by 18.7 million by 2032, labor force participation is expected to drop from 62.5 percent currently to 60.4 percent.

The result? The U.S. will have more people but less of them will be working, and although women are earning degrees and filling a number of roles in healthcare, they only account for around 2 percent of workers in traditionally male-dominated sectors such as contractors, plumbing, HVAC and auto maintenance.

Substance abuse and incarceration also play a significant part in why so many prime-age men are leaving the workforce. Jobs where workplace injuries are highest tend to be the most affected by addiction.

One in four opioid deaths in Massachusetts occurred in construction and extraction occupations, in which 96 percent of all workers are male, and almost 70 percent are prime-age.

Where do we go from here?

While the Lightcast report makes for grim reading, it also offers several recommendations to steady the ship.

For starters, employers need to stop looking at new recruits as fully-formed star employees “preloaded” with the exact skills and abilities they are looking for. Instead, different skills and qualifications should be considered and ATS (applicant tracking systems) shouldn’t be used as restrictively.

Employers also need to think about what they are offering their employees beyond a paycheck, especially prime-age women with children who tend to leave the workforce at a higher rate than women who are similarly educated but do not have children.

Foreign-born workers are also crucial—18 percent of healthcare workers were born outside of the U.S.—and are essentially keeping the economy afloat.

And while you could argue that AI automation could be the solution, in the sectors that need it most, we’re a long way away from a chatbot replacing a nurse.

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