Frustrated!

Frustrated by the fact that when the Stock Market or the Real Estate Market takes a turn for the worst, training and development along with marketing are the two things that immediately appear on the radar screen and are transferred to the “hit list” of most CEO’s. People development just seems to go out the window along with the things that hopefully will bring the customers in. I think the expression that my mother used was, “we tend to cut off our noses despite our face”.

It is well documented that we have the greatest number of employees leaving the workforce and we have the greatest number of future workers with the least experience ready to take their place. Due to current market conditions, we now can’t afford to train them so that our plan for the succession of the “baby boomers” goes right out the window. This transition will now become a transformation because it cannot possibly be as smooth and transparent as originally intended. We certainly enjoy being in the reactive mode and not the proactive mode.

I think we are viewing the re-structuring of our workforce very similarly to that of our highway system or mass transit system. We will worry about the problem of having companies with no trained workers only when it is time to be productive or close the doors. When are we going to realize the need for mass transit?...when there are too many cars on the highways so grid-lock is commonplace or it now takes twenty hours to go from Philadelphia to New York..

The exodus from the workforce is well under way so when are you going to feel an obligation to do something about it…..when you receive your first check from Social Security or now, when you can call it succession planning. I think as “boomers”, we are obligated to make sure that our companies have qualified people with the appropriate skills sets to make a difference in the future. Let’s not wait for our companies to be “bottle-necked” by lack of qualified personnel. Train, coach, and mentor now before it is too late and the “bottle-neck” is equivalent to “grid-lock”.