Chapter 11: Critical Skills Loss – The Effect of the Disappearance of Non-Replaceable Workforce

Workforce aging impacts both the workers in a workforce and the organizations that they work for. The effect of workforce aging on organizations includes productivity, stability, retention of knowledge, retention of workers, and in some cases the ability to continue the support of critical systems. The magnitude and type of the impact of workforce aging depends on the particular product and/or service sector that an organization is engaged in. For some sectors, the loss of worker skills and experience can be mitigated via knowledge capture/transfer and the training of younger workers; however, in other sectors experience can be very difficult to replace. This chapter focuses on the loss of critical skills that are either non-replaceable or take prohibitively long times to reconstitute.