Gen-X and gen-y: Teaching Them the Business

How to bridge the age gap between older and younger workers in the utility industry.

The utility industry will face its most severe workforce problem since World War II in the next five to 10 years-a massive loss of plant- and job-specific knowledge through the retirement of a large portion of today's utility workforce. This magnitude of attrition has been masked somewhat by slow and steady, economically driven staffing cutbacks, but it will accelerate as we move into the second half of this decade. At the same time, the pool of technical and engineering talent available to fill critical jobs is insufficient to fill the job openings at this time.

These facts already might affect safety, reliability, and profitability throughout the industry, in any of the following ways:

• Increases in the duration of planned and forced outages, as the new hires gradually build expertise and efficiency in their jobs;
• Increased frequencies of forced outages and accidents caused by human error as highly experienced operators retire; and
• Falling productivity in areas of maintenance or operations that require physical strength, agility, and durability.¹

The problem is particularly acute in areas such as transmission and distribution, nuclear generation, and radiation health physics, where highly specialized knowledge is required.