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An OECD study highlights the growing proportion of older workers within companies. With the aging of the world’s population, this trend will continue to strengthen: for example, France’s share of the workforce over the age of 55 is estimated at 23% in 2031. Yet many companies have no specific approach to preparing for this evolution of the job market. Take a look at your organization:

- What are you doing to retain, or even rehire older employees? Mitsubishi Corporation created a career center dedicated exclusively to employees aged 60 and over, which includes a job marketplace and personalized advice.

- Are your training programs adapted? In 2021, Atos launched a program to fill the skills gaps of its 21,000 employees over the age of 50. The people concerned have set themselves development objectives and have selected the most beneficial training courses and certifications for their progression.

- Do you open the door to forms of work that reflect the specific expectations and skills of older workers? BMW’s Senior Experts program allows retirees to return to the company on a part-time basis in order to share their expertise with younger employees. This helps both the organization to meet the need for flexibility and these senior experts to perform less physically demanding tasks, while at the same time enhancing their skills.

Source: Better with Age: The Rising Importance of Older Workers, James Root, Andrew Schwedel, Mike Haslett Nicole Bitler, Bain & Company, July 2023.

According to the 2023 edition of Microsoft’s Work Trend Index Annual Report, 82% of executives consider that their employees will need new skills to prepare themselves for the generalization of artificial intelligence. Does this mean there should be a scramble for technical training? Nothing is less certain. The report insists first and foremost on the need to prepare employees to collaborate efficiently with an AI. To that end, the aptitudes to be reinforced are essentially cognitive and behavioral ones, with, by order of importance:

- analytical judgment (cited by 30% of executives) to determine in which situations it is beneficial to lean on an AI rather than on human abilities;

- cognitive flexibility (cited by 29% of executives) to refine the AI’s proposals and efficiently integrate them into one’s work;

- emotional intelligence (cited by 27% of executives), a capability that is complementary to AI, and which it can be valuable to mobilize depending on the nature of the task or the context.

Finally, 23% of executives cite intellectual curiosity, to know how to ask the AI the right questions, and 22% cite the detection of biases. A good starting point for adapting your training programs and refining the qualities to be prioritized when recruiting. 

Source: Will AI Fix Work?—2023 Work Trend Index: Annual Report, Microsoft, May 2023.

If you employ software developers, cloud engineers, data scientists or SaaS administrators, you are very probably wondering how to attract them—and especially how to retain them.

Indeed, these key profiles receive multiple solicitations from recruiters every month and do not hesitate to change employers. Their unemployment rate borders on zero. And if they lose a job, they know they will find another in less than three months. In such conditions, which are extremely favorable to them, how can we hold on to them?

McKinsey undertook to decode their expectations in a survey conducted in the United States, but which reflects a global trend. It clearly appears that the main factor determining their loyalty to a position, like their choice of a new job, is career development and the potential for promotion—ahead of remuneration, the meaning of their missions and the working atmosphere.

But careful: by this they do not refer to a career in the traditional sense of hierarchical advancement. What is essential for them is to be able to choose between an “expert” career path and a “manager” one—both of these paths enjoying the same internal recognition—and to be able to move from one to the other without obstacles. Now you just have to provide them with such opportunities.

Source: Cracking the code on digital talent, Todd Horst, Kathryn Kuhn, Stephanie Madner, Charlotte Seiler, Paul Roche, McKinsey Quarterly, April 2023.

“Managers are cracking”, states Gartner in publishing the results of its annual survey of 9,000 US employees and managers. The numbers are staggering. Less than one surveyed employee out of two believes that their manager is able to lead their team down the right track. And 54% of surveyed managers state that they suffer from their working conditions. Cause for concern, given that good managers multiply by 15 their team members’ chances of being highly effective, and by three their loyalty to the company.

What can be done? One enlightening finding of this study is that training only improves managerial performance by 4%. On the other hand, if managers believe they have the means to manage their missions over the long term, their performance improves by 21%.

Gartner identifies four levers to act on this dimension. It is beneficial to redefine expectations so that they are more realistic, to revisit management routines, to eliminate the obstacles that prevent the manager from truly playing their part; but the most impactful of these levers is to modify the process of acceding to the position of manager. When potential managers have been asked to indicate if they were tempted by this role, their performance in this new role is multiplied by 2.3.

Source: Managers Are Cracking—and More Training Won’t Help, Gartner, August 2023.

Career paths are growing increasingly choppy. For a long time, women were the ones most affected by interruptions in their careers, often motivated by familial considerations. Today, the phenomenon extends beyond that context and is growing in scale. More and more employees are taking pauses in their careers: personal project, time for reflection, partial retraining, etc. However, it is not always easy to get back into the professional flow, which has itself not been interrupted. This challenge concerns employees as much as companies: the latter have every interest to make the most of this workforce—which often returns with renewed dynamism.

This is why certain organizations have implemented specific support programs. Mastercard and Amazon, for example, offer programs running over a 12- to 16-week duration, aimed at any new employee joining the company after taking an extended career break.  Others target this population to attract employees in areas in which they need to reinforce their capabilities. Certain subsidiaries of Avanade, an IT services company, provide financial assistance to women undertaking to retrain in the IT field. And you, what do you offer employees to get back in the saddle after a career break?

Source: Working Women and the War for Talent, Bianca Bax, Andrew Schwedel, Fai Assakul, Nicole Bitler, Bain & Company, September 2022.