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The modern workforce has no shortage of white-collar tensions\u2014from return-to-office mandates to AI anxiety and Slack etiquette wars. But another issue is quietly creeping into the workforce\u2014one rooted not in technology or bureaucracy, but in age. America\u2019s population is aging rapidly, and there aren\u2019t enough young workers to backfill their critical roles; Svenja Gudell, chief economist at Indeed, says the generational imbalance is straining the workforce.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re entering a new phase of a great mismatch,\u201d Gudell recently said onstage at Fortune<\/em>\u2019s Workplace Innovation Summit. \u201cWe\u2019re going to have workers in places we actually don\u2019t want workers, and we\u2019re going to have to reallocate a whole bunch of jobs to other people, and that\u2019s going to cause a little bit of pain.\u201d<\/p>\n The Indeed economist explains that most industrialized countries are going through the shift. Among the Group of Seven countries with advanced economies\u2014including the U.S., Canada, France, and Italy\u2014workers 55 and up will make up more than 25% of the workforce by 2031, about 10% higher than in 2011, according to an analysis from Bain. And as more baby boomers (representing 15% of the U.S. workforce) drift into retirement, younger generations won\u2019t be able to fill in the gap. Plus, the career ambitions of Gen Z and millennial workers differ from those of their predecessors\u2014and it\u2019s creating a supply gap in some industries like skilled trades, manufacturing, and healthcare.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s really important to also recognize that there\u2019s lots of stuff happening right now\u2014it\u2019s not just AI,\u201d Gudell continued. \u201cDemographic change is a huge one that\u2019s knocking on our door right now.\u201d<\/p>\n Becky Schmitt, chief people officer at PepsiCo, agrees with the economist that there\u2019s a glaring gap in the labor force. And she believes AI can help address that problem; the executive explained that as demographics change, the $203 billion multinational food company can streamline some of the \u201charder jobs\u201d that people are less interested in by automating them. And younger generations\u2019 unwillingness to take on certain roles even extends far beyond the U.S.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re even finding in countries where you still have large populations and a lot of young people [that] they want to be influencers\u2014they don\u2019t actually want to be a salesperson,\u201d Schmitt said onstage during the panel. \u201cSo there is this mismatch also in interest, and so we\u2019ve got to be more efficient.\u201d<\/p>\n The U.S. and many industrialized countries are facing the same issue: older populations are growing, while smaller, younger generations are opting to have fewer kids.\u00a0<\/p>\n Workers 55 and older have been the fastest-growing age group in the labor force for over two decades, accounting for nearly a quarter of the U.S. workforce in 2022, according to U.S. Census Bureau research. And now, some sectors are scrambling to attract young professionals to their fields; employees aged 55 and up made up 80% of the utilities industry in 2022. And in manufacturing and wholesale trade, these older workers accounted for 40% of the headcounts.\u00a0<\/p>\n And this generational mismatch is like no other; for the first time in modern history, older people aged 65 and up will outnumber 16-year-olds in the workforce,\u00a0according to a\u00a02024 Lightcast report.<\/span> OECD research has also found that the working-age population, aged 20 to 64, will decline in many of these developed countries in the coming years. By 2060, the working-age population will fall by 30% in a quarter of OECD nations\u2014from Canada and Colombia to South Korea and Spain.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n #chief #economist #entering #era #great #mismatch<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The modern workforce has no shortage of white-collar tensions\u2014from return-to-office mandates to AI anxiety and Slack etiquette wars. But another issue is quietly creeping into the workforce\u2014one rooted not in… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3560,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5821,2436,283,426,1244,822,817,1910,5824,3359,800,5822,428,1303,1071,5240,430,329,987,224,5825,5823,208,5611,3088,335,5161,1914],"class_list":["post-3559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-aging","tag-baby-boomers","tag-business","tag-careers","tag-chief","tag-economist","tag-economists","tag-employment","tag-entering","tag-era","tag-executives","tag-gen-x","tag-gen-z","tag-great","tag-health","tag-indeed","tag-jobs","tag-labor","tag-manufacturing","tag-millennials","tag-mismatch","tag-pepsico","tag-retirement","tag-u-s-workers","tag-united-states","tag-workers","tag-workplace-innovation-summit","tag-young-workers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3559"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3559\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The growing great mismatch in the global workforce\u00a0<\/h2>\n