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A touch of gray

More firms turn to older workers as labor force ages

Friday, Oct. 7, 2005

With the number of older workers on the rise, Goresh and NASD have launched Work Life, a program designed to retain and recruit them.

Nearly 20 percent of U.S. workers will be 55 or older by 2012, up from 12 percent in 1992, according to AARP. Many businesses, including NASD, are finding ways to take advantage of the benefits of older workers, especially with workforce shortages predicted for the future.

‘‘They are our most productive workers,” said Goresh, referring to 45- to 55-year-old workers, which make up one-third of the 2,000 NASD’s employees nationwide, including 900 in Rockville.

Experience counts at NASD. Goresh said knowledge of the finance industry is an important qualification for employees at the company, which is chartered by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to register, inform and examine securities firms and to enforce securities laws and help resolve disputes between investors and firms.

Click here to enlarge this photo Charlie Shoemaker⁄The Gazette Joyce Weaver, 60, who works for Jobin Realty in Bethesda, is part of the nation’s aging workforce, a resource that more companies are starting to tap. Click here to enlarge this photo Susan Whitney-Wilkerson/The Gazette Rafael Arellano, a former professor at Connecticut College who founded an employment placement business, now helps older workers find jobs through the Montgomery Works center in Wheaton.

A new AARP study, ‘‘Blueprint for the Future,” reports that more and more older people are working each year and postponing retirement past age 65, although not necessarily postponing receipt of benefits.

‘‘People are working longer and see a lot of value yet in working,” said Eric Seleznow, director of the Montgomery County Workforce Investment Services. ‘‘It is certainly an important part of the county’s economic development. And, it is clear to me that, from all the national attention this gets, this is a burgeoning issue nationally.”

Worker shortage looms

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that if the economy continues to grow at its current rate, there may be a shortage of 10 million workers to fill available jobs by 2010, said bureau analyst Mitra Toossi. Workers between 25 and 54 are expected to drop to 66 percent of the workforce from 71 percent in 2000.

About 41 percent of members of the Society for Human Resource Management in Alexandria, Va., who responded to a recent survey said that their organizations ‘‘are bringing back retirees to work in some capacity,” said Jennifer Schramm, the nonprofit association’s manager of workplace trends and forecasting.

In another society survey in 2003, 31 percent of respondents said their organizations offer various employee options to either attract or retain older workers.

Family-friendly benefits — elder-care centers, flextime, leave to care for relatives and formal phased retirement — for workers 55 to 64 years old was a top inducement, according to the survey. Educational services organizations were the leading sector in offering such benefits, with 22 percent offering them, Schramm said. Next was government at 15 percent; durable goods manufacturing, 13 percent; non-durable goods manufacturing, 11 percent; nonprofits, 12 percent; for-profit services and health, 11 percent; and high-technology business, 8 percent.

Some employers‘not enthused’

But despite trends of more older workers both nationally and in Maryland, many companies, especially many large ones, are still not enthused about hiring older workers, says David Gamse, executive director of the Jewish Council for the Aging in Rockville.

‘‘There is a discomfort in American society with things that are old, things that are wrinkled,” he told a statewide audience at an August seminar, ‘‘Vanishing Work Force: Drafting Seniors to Fill the Need,” in Ocean City. ‘‘Do employers consider older workers? Not typically of the big world out there.”

Many employers in recent studies, he said, still say older workers have antiquated skills, resist change, expect higher salaries and cost employers more in medical insurance and other benefits.

‘Ahead of the curve’

NASD, though, is ‘‘ahead of the curve” for companies that make older workers a priority, according to AARP. The group named NASD Maryland’s 2005 Best Employer for workers over 50.

‘‘Employers looking to recruit and retain a skilled and experienced workforce could learn much from companies who are ahead of the curve in providing exemplary policies and practices for a mature workforce,” said Kelley Coates-Carter, spokeswoman for AARP-Maryland.

NASD’s Work Life program offers older workers flextime, compressed work schedules, job and position sharing, and telecommuting.

To encourage retired company employees to stay on, NASD allows them to keep their benefits intact while returning to work on a consulting or contractual basis.

‘‘We have not seen any difficulties in hiring seniors,” Goresh said. A few years ago, ‘‘We looked at the large number of people eligible for retirement in the next few years. We realized the old model of one-size-employment-fits all programs will not work. We needed to achieve a balance to keep them.”

The trend propelling the company to hire and retain older workers, Goresh said, is not that more ‘‘baby boomers are headed toward retirement.” Rather, he said, he is ‘‘looking at the beginning of a shortage of younger workers in the future.”

Pepco’s ‘payrollees’

One active mature worker is Mary Ann Evan, 65, who lives just over the Montgomery County line in Washington, D.C. Evan is a retired information technology professional who is still at Pepco, the Washington utility that provides electricity for much of suburban Maryland. Working part-time, Evan kept her Pepco retirement benefits intact because she is paid, not by Pepco, but by a contractor, Taleo Corp. of San Francisco.

Taleo pays the returning retirees, which Pepco call ‘‘payrollees,” through several different staffing companies, said Earnest Jenkins, Pepco’s vice president of people strategy and human resources.

‘‘There is an aging-workforce issue we’re facing right now because a large part of our workforce is reaching retirement age,” Jenkins said. Pepco, with more than 5,000 employees in five states, tries to keep the mature worker engaged with the company, he said.

‘‘They have institutional knowledge that is valuable to us ... rather than having this gap,” he said. Pepco has about 4,000 retirees, with a small percentage choosing to return as payrollees, he added.

Pepco brought Evan back to utilize both her IT experience and her longtime hobby, writing. She writes technical documentation to keep Pepco’s information systems safe from hackers.

‘‘I think it is fantastic,” Evan said of the work arrangement. ‘‘It is not like you couldn’t do this work with another company. But if you have lots invested into the company and you can stay, Pepco gets all the benefit of my experience.”

She works on a flexible schedule and can work by e-mail from home.

‘‘If I don’t feel like coming in, I set my own schedule. And the work, I love. I have been very fortunate,” said Evan who now also has time to write fiction and a history of her Polish-American family.

‘I put people together’

‘‘Yes, you always have to get back on the horse,” is the standard advice from Rafael Arellano to older workers, drawing from his favorite 15th-century Spanish ballad poem, ‘‘El Cid.” The retired professor of Hispanic culture now places seniors and other workers with companies in his second full-time stint as a core service worker at Montgomery Works’ workforce center at Westfield Shoppingtown in Wheaton.

‘‘I put people together,” he said.

Arellano, Seleznow says, is the ideal role model for older workers who retrain and re-enter the workforce. The native of Puerto Rico retired after 22 years of teaching at Connecticut College in New London in 1991, then moved to Montgomery County to be with relatives. But he said he could not stay retired. Part-time teaching jobs for several years were not gratifying,

Then, Arellano received training in office and computer skills at the Senior Aides program at the Jewish Council for the Aging and at Montgomery Works. ‘‘I thought that I would try to work with people who need hope because hope is what the Spanish ballads are all about,” he said.

He soon started his own placement business, Raphael Arellano Recruiting Workers. Gamse, with the Jewish seniors group, said many older workers like to go into their own businesses. Arellano has since abandoned his placement business — his driving to meet clients in northern Virginia and Baltimore and rising gasoline costs became cost-prohibitive, he said — and returned to Montgomery Works.

Older and more reliable

Many older workers also are hired back into the workforce by smaller companies. Last week, Sy Kasambira — a native of Zimbabwe with a doctorate in business management who is following in Arellano’s footsteps at the Jewish council’s Senior Aides program in Bethesda — placed 60-year-old Joyce Weaver of Silver Spring as the new receptionist at Jobin Real Estate office at Montgomery Mall.

‘‘I could not find a job at all for quite a while and I don’t know how much my age had to do with it,” Weaver said. The Senior Aides program provided Weaver with better opportunities for interviews, she said, and refresher courses in computer skills.

‘‘It is our privilege to hire an ‘older worker,’” Michelle Simon, Jobin’s manager at the mall office, wrote in an e-mail.

‘‘Age is not an issue. Fulfilling the job position is what our goal is. We were lucky to learn of this program through a friend who works at the agency,” she said of the Senior Aides. Jobin owner Joseph Yost said Simon has often suggested hiring older workers.

‘‘Smaller employers tend to value older employees more because of their reliability,” Gamse said. ‘‘If you need your store opened on time, and you need someone to be there so that the door is shut and locked at 9 in the evening, an older worker typically can be depended upon.

‘‘Also it is not older workers typically that are using leave days as much as younger workers do,” he said.

For Lockheed Martin Corp. in Bethesda, retaining very specialized knowledge in older employers is a concern, said spokesman Thomas Greer. The median age of its employees — including 60,000 highly trained scientists and engineers nationwide — is above 40, he said.

‘‘We have an understanding of that dynamic,” Greer said, ‘‘and it is critical that we have means to foster and encourage some of our later-stage workers to mentor some of the younger employees.”

Competitors, such as Boeing, Northrop-Grumman and Raytheon, ‘‘would say the same thing,” he said.

Consequently, Lockheed maintains the best ‘‘quality of life and competitive” employment package as possible to keep its talent, Greer said.

The nation’s aging workforce is a complex phenomenon, Seleznow said.

‘‘It is not all just poor seniors being on welfare,” he said. ‘‘It is also wealthy retired people who want to work. And don’t forget there are 70,000 veterans in Montgomery County, many of them are over 50 and want to work. So there are many layers of this issue.”

More information

For more information on hiring, retaining or retraining older workers:
*Maryland Department of Aging 410-767-1100, 800-243-3425 www.mdoa.state.md.us
*Montgomery County Aging and Disability Services 240-777-1131
*Montgomery Works, Wheaton 301-946-1806
*Montgomery Works, Gaithersburg 301-519-8253
*Montgomery Works, Maryland relay number 800-201-7165
*Jewish Council on Aging, Senior Help Line Plus 301-881-0574