Addressing the Retirement Wave

Dice.com has an interesting article about how the coming retirement wave of 76 million baby boomers over the next 18 years will create an even greater demand for technology experts, not just to replace these seasoned workers but also to develop new technologies, like patient monitoring, independent living concepts, assistive technologies and wired pillboxes.

The federal government also will face huge demands on both sides of this issue: It will need to replace retiring IT workers while also providing critical services to the aging population, particularly at agencies like the Social Security Administration and the Health and Human Services and Veterans Affairs departments. There's little doubt that technology will play an even larger role, and thus, the demand for federal tech workers is bound to increase all the more.

The federal CIO Council in June released a report that provides federal agencies a blueprint for addressing the new demands of technology and the workforce as the more seasoned federal IT workers enter into retirement. Earlier this month, Dave Wennergren, deputy chief information officer at the Defense Department and co-chairman of the CIO Council, said the report holds implications for the entire workforce.

"If you're an information leader, you should read the whole thing from cover to cover," he said. "But my take is that even if you're not an information manager, if you're any kind of manager in the federal sector, you ought to at least read the middle part about what the workforce is going to be like in the future and how you can use the tools of the personnel system to full advantage. And even if you're not in the federal government, the middle section is still quite intriguing about what it describes as the nature of the workforce."