RETIRING LOSSES
By
Ed Fenwick
Senior Vice President
In the past year, the impact of retiring baby boomers has started to become real for a number of our clients. Social statisticians may soon produce some metrics that give measure to the severity of retirement-caused talent gaps, but executives at many firms will tell you it is happening now and it is severe.
Interestingly, as we look across the insurance organizations with which we are intimately familiar, we see that this gap is very often the largest in Information Technology functions. Rapidly fleeing to retirement are the senior and mid-level IT managers. A common characteristic of these retirees is a strong and fundamental understanding of the business. Most of them started, and spent a fair amount of their career, on the business side of insurance. They often made the transition to IT as part of a major automation initiative they led from the business side. Once in IT, their understanding of the business was key to continued success. They could translate business needs as they shaped the company’s IT agenda.
As these IT executives retire, organizations are finding that there is often no in-house second string to step up and replace them. Behind these retiring business-savvy executives are often individuals with specific and strong IT skills, but the broad business understanding and perspective is lacking. As our IT environments have become more complex, they have required higher degrees of specialization. This became an increasingly large barrier for movement between business functional silos and IT organizations. External recruiting to replace them is not much of an option either. One CIO recently expressed frustration that this is such a pervasive problem in the industry that “you can’t even hire this type of person away from other insurance companies. If you manage to find them, they are not willing to move; they are getting ready to retire themselves.”
There are steps you can take to reduce your organization’s exposure to this specific type of talent gap:
