Labor Shortage?
What about the Knowledge Shortage?

As we get rolling into 2022, there is a labor shortage looming across every industry segment in the nation. Of all the things people expected to come out of the pandemic, no one expected this! In fact, most people thought the opposite would be true – that their jobs would be in jeopardy.

While the labor shortage is a problem for everyone, the Facilities Industry is going to experience it on a different scale. Why? Because baby boomers were already retiring in big numbers before the pandemic started, and that trend has only accelerated. In the next few years, it’s only going to get worse as more experience and specialized knowledge walk out the door along with long-tenured employees.

It’s those tenured and long-term employees who hold most of the institutional knowledge of large building complexes and campuses. So, while you might lose just 20% of your team members to retirement, you may lose 60% of the legacy information and collective experience in the facilities where they work. This could be debilitating for large, well-established building complexes.

It is also relevant to point out that the transfer of knowledge and training of employees in the Facilities Industry is no easy task. How do you make sure that decades worth of critical building information is transferred to incoming employees when most of it resides in individuals’ heads?

There’s no doubt that 2022 is likely to bring some extraordinary challenges to our industry. Capturing and maintaining valuable knowledge and experience is just one of them!

Want to learn more about real issues that are affecting the facilities management community like labor shortages? We’d love to invite you to follow us on Linkedin.

 

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eBook: Retiring Workers: How to Keep Critical Information from Walking out the Door
Video: How Facilities Professionals are Protecting Against Knowledge Loss
Webinar: Proactive Facility Succession Planning: Minimize the Impact of Retiring Workers