Older Workers: Once Trashed, Now Treasured

Ryan just wanted to work again.

After enduring five months of unemployment last year, the 60-year-old posted her resume on a couple of Web-based jobs boards, convinced her age would work against her.

She was wrong.

Within months, she landed a job at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as a marketing communications expert.

"I'm delighted," she says. "Age isn't a factor here. They wanted someone who could step right in, and I could."

She was the beneficiary of a new federal effort aimed at warning both the public and private sectors of a looming "brain drain" that experts say will accelerate as 78 million baby boomers age.

"It's going to cause a lot of problems and cost a lot of money to replace these people who know so much," says David DeLong, a research fellow at the AgeLab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of "Lost Knowledge: Confronting the Threat of an Aging Workforce." "They know how to get things done."

The U.S. Government Accountability Office says 50 percent of today's work force will be gone within five to 10 years. It's estimated that half of the 3.2 million leading-edge baby boomers who turn 62 this year will take early retirement.

Federal and state governments are most affected, but the ranks of academe also are heavy with older workers. Doctors as well as nurses are retiring at rapid rates.


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