Berger Blog

A colleague of mine was sharing a story about a company she was working with recently. The company is in the transportation business – shipping really big things across long distances in the United States and Canada. Since China has become such a huge trade partner, lots of goods are coming in to the West coast and need to get all over the continent. The industry hasn’t seem a boom like this in many years. She told me they are hiring people as fast as they can.

The work she was doing recently involved some training with senior leadership of the business. As they were talking, she asked the managers she was with, “So, how many years do you have here?” One said 25 years, another said 28, a third said 32, and a fourth said 24. “Oh, the baby in the group,” she replied. “No, just 24 years here. I had ten at a competitor before coming here,” was his response.

So just at one table, there was more than one hundred years of experience. The significance here is that while all of these people were building up the years, this company hired no one. Literally, no new people. Over the course of 17 years, this company had brought in almost no new people at all. And today, they are hiring like crazy.

As these managers were talking about the issues that are facing the company, it was clear that an entire generation had been skipped. When these managers start heading out the retirement door -- and some already have – there is no one to take over their jobs, just a bunch of 20-somethings with fewer than a year’s time on the job.

And now, they need to do something to make the next 5-10 years work.