Strategies to Mitigate Utility Workforce Retirements
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Get ready, experts are predicting that utility workforce retirements are coming in full force to sap your storm response expertise. They say that a whopping 50% of utility employees will retire over the next 10 years. This drain of experience and knowledge will make it more difficult to handle emergency situations. The good news is that this problem is no secret, and therefore in theory there is plenty of time to prepare.
How to Address the Upcoming Mass Utility Workforce Retirements
Obviously, maintaining a solid pipeline of incoming talent is crucial, and I have previously covered tips and strategies for succession planning. But perhaps a less obvious course of action is to make better use of technologies like the internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, digital twins, virtual reality, and augmented reality.
Any of these technologies, when deployed smartly, can help automate certain tasks, improve communication, provide helpful tools for simplifying tasks, and enhance training and education programs, all of which can be leveraged to offset some of the negative impact of a retiring workforce. Simply put, these types of technologies ? in theory ? can help utilities accomplish the same or better results with fewer internal resources.
They say there is no substitute for experience, and this may very well be true, but at the very least these tools can help boost organizational knowledge. By enhancing training and educational content, and making it readily accessible, some of the lost experience can be regained through knowledge. In fact, thanks to the availability of these technologies, one could argue that experience is less important nowadays than it used to be.
The bottom line is that the time to start addressing the sheer volume of expected utility workforce retirements over the next decade is now. New technologies usually take years to deploy and refine, so you’ll want to make sure that everything is setup to allow the organization to hit the ground running when the retirement letters start flowing.
