Pushing 40 : ‘Boomers’ Redefining Job Success
Sometime during the next nine months, the vanguard of that postwar phenomenon known as the baby boom will turn 40. Middle age will have come at last to the unwieldy bunch that so noisily redefined youth in the 1960s.
But instead of sedentary peace and quiet, the middle-aging of the baby boomers will bring a whole new set of economic and social uncertainties for themselves and the country as a whole.
A good many baby boomers, particularly those approaching their 40s whose careers have so far advanced smoothly, will begin to face a worrisome prospect: As they climb toward the summit of the traditional corporate-jobs pyramid from the broad base into which they crowded a decade ago, they could find themselves stymied, with further promotions out of reach.
Postwar Generation
Too many mid-level executives will almost certainly be competing for too few top-level jobs. Although every generation of workers experiences this crunch to some degree, the huge numbers of the baby boom could magnify the problem enormously. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that while the adult labor force will grow 29% between 1982 and 1995, the 35-44 age bracket will expand 64% and the 45-54 age group will increase by 48%.
The baby boom generation, roughly those born between the end of World War II and 1964, has had enormous impact on every population age bracket through which it has passed. In the 1950s, taxpayers had to finance thousands of new classrooms. In the 1970s, the boomers flooded the labor market just as inflation and stagnation hit the economy, aggravating the nation’s growing unemployment problem.
In this decade, the job market could face “a crazy situation,” says Anthony P. Carnevale of the American Society for Training and Development, a Washington-based industry research group. Carnevale foresees extreme stress affecting the baby boomers as they jostle for increasingly scarce promotions.
New Personnel Practices
Employment analysts contend that much of the frustration can be avoided if baby boomers and their bosses can learn to be flexible. To employers, it means changing old personnel practices and encouraging new career development paths.
To many of the boomers, it means discarding conventional notions of advancement and finding other outlets for job gratification--finding contentment as a professional, for instance, instead of pining away for an executive title.
Already there are signs that such changes are occurring.
For example, corporate culture seems to be changing in ways that have made obsolete the conventional expectations of orderly promotion through layers of middle management.
Some companies are adjusting to the mounting economic competition and the efficiencies of the computer age by slimming their bureaucracies and stripping away layers of management, a tactic that could deprive ambitious baby boomers of potential promotion slots. But there are other, more radical changes in corporate personnel frameworks that could create more opportunities for baby boomers who have the imagination, flexibility and confidence to take advantage of them.
“Industry generally is moving toward streamlining management structure and having fewer levels,” says Don K. Conover, general manager for education and training at ATT Technologies in Hopewell, N.J.
“Thanks in part to information technology, fewer people can handle more information and make more decisions. You need fewer managers to look after results and chase after numbers.
“The other side of the coin is that companies tend to give larger responsibilities to people at lower levels. From that point of view, the content of many jobs for many people has expanded. Responsibility is diffused to lower levels. There is less lock-step performance of the job, more volatility; more smaller projects are being carried out under decentralized control.”
More Leaders, Fewer Managers
“Organizations will go through a substantial redesign of work,” predicts John W. Humphrey, president of Forum Corp. of North America, a Boston-based management consulting firm. “To succeed, the larger companies will have to pare down hierarchies, develop networks, alliances, more agility, faster and more efficient internal communication. You’ll need more leaders throughout the system than you had before, and fewer managers.”
This may already be happening in the insurance and financial service industries, which have rapidly assimilated advanced office technology. Prudential, the industry giant, has shifted away from the broad-based pyramidal structure as technological advances have led to a greater need for mid-level professional skills than for entry-level workers in menial key-punching or clerical jobs.
Likewise, Citicorp executives say they need fewer people to fill boring, repetitious and low-paying jobs, such as clerks and tellers, and more professionals to run and oversee the wide variety of services banks now offer. Citicorp recently estimated that as many as one-third of its new hires now are either professional or managerial--an example of an organizational chart that bulges more in the middle than at the bottom.
Change Offers Hope
One executive says the pyramid of 15 years ago, with its built-in barriers to advancement, now “looks like an onion or a football.” That shape holds out new hope to baby boomers.
Monsanto, the St. Louis-based chemical giant that in most respects is a sturdy holdover from the goods-producing American industry, has undergone a massive reordering of its corporate structure. Says Charles D. Norlander, director of personnel planning at Monsanto:
“We’re all struggling with the issue of what the 1990s organization will look like: a more rapidly changing economic environment, fewer smokestack industries, more technology, fewer people, less mid-management supervision.”
The ranks of middle-management supervisors at Monsanto declined by at least 10% from 1980 to 1984, while the number of professionals, such as chemical engineers, increased by about the same amount.
“This shift from supervisory to professional may accelerate,” says Norlander. Moreover, while the total number of jobs available to highly trained baby boomers has not changed, “the roles have begun to change, and career expectations also have to change,” he says. “This has been recognized by people at these middle-management levels: Instead of the traditional movement up the management ladder, they will have to accept a need to change roles or move laterally.”
More Individualistic Bent
In addition, boomers will be able to help themselves because “they have generally been conditioned by experience to reject the hierarchical pattern of the pyramid,” says Ralph Whitehead Jr., a professor at the University of Massachusetts who has tracked the working experience of the boomers since they first made their mark on the American labor market. “Instead, they are more likely to strike out on their own and find a niche in the economy that fits their ethos.”
That’s just what William E. Foster, now the president of Stratus Computer, did six years ago. Foster was then the 35-year-old vice president at Data General, one of the established computer companies in the outer suburbs of Boston. He says his breakaway was prompted not by dissatisfaction with his career at Data General, but rather by a sense--shared by many of his contemporaries in the early 1980s--that it was time to take a risk.
“I grew up in this business,” says Foster, a Berkeley native and a graduate of UC Santa Clara who started out at Hewlett-Packard in the Silicon Valley and moved to Massachusetts in the mid-1970s. “I got to know a number of computer company presidents, and I drew the conclusion that they didn’t walk on water, so I decided if they could do it, I could at least try.”
Stratus Computer, now in Marlborough, Mass., started out with about 30 employees and now has about 140. The company makes specialized, “fault-tolerant” equipment for banks, brokerage houses, military contractors and other users that need machinery guaranteed not to fail even in power outages. It grossed $42 million last year and has been roughly doubling sales annually.
Similar cases are becoming increasingly common in New England, where the individualistic niche-finder seems to have flourished as high technology has moved into the vacuum left by the decline of textiles and other industries.
High Professional Turnover
But there is abundant evidence of similar economic ferment in other areas of the country. In Dallas, Bernard H. List, vice president in charge of education and training for Texas Instruments, notes that his firm’s highly motivated electronic and computer engineers tend not to stay put long enough to stagnate.
“In this kind of business, the usual outlet has been that they leave and form their own small high-tech companies,” List says. “That has been happening at every high-tech company there is. The fact is, the better the people you hire in the first place, the higher probability there is that they will want to leave and start up their own businesses.”
Underlying the entire question is the state of the nation’s economy.
For example, “The ‘70s were a rotten experience for the baby boom generation,” says Frank Levy of the University of Maryland school of public affairs. But he points out that the decade was equally bad for older workers.
Based on the experience of earlier decades, Levy says, workers could expect their incomes to rise 25% beyond the inflation rate while they were between ages 40 and 50--an increase of more than 2% a year in so-called real income.
Unusual Income Decline
“But, on average,” says Levy, “a 40-year-old in 1973 suffered a 15% decline in real income by 1983. That had nothing to do with cohort size: In fact, they (workers who were in their 40s in the early 1970s) were the abnormally small Depression generation. It had everything to do with the fact that we had a bad economy during that period.”
Since 1983, Levy says, real incomes have begun growing again.
“So it may turn out to be a wash for the boomers,” he says. “As they get into middle age, they are getting past the point of the fastest and biggest promotions in their individual careers. But they are moving into a better economy. The real issue may turn out to be, will there be enough growth in the economy to go around?
“If so, the boom generation will be absorbed. If not, there will be problems--for all age groupings.”
