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SOUTHWEST NEW MEXICO’S

SKILLED SENIOR WORKFORCE PROGRAM

A Description

Background: The Skilled Senior Workforce Program is a collaborative partnership between Grant County Senior Services and the Silver City Office of the Department of Workforce Solutions.

The National Employ Older Workers Week, is celebrated every year to showcase efforts of the Dept of Workforce Solutions’, “Senior Community Service Employment Program” and is traditionally focused on the needs of older people with limited financial resources.

Grant County Senior Services has teamed with the Dept of Workforce Solutions to launch a second program to assist skilled professionals and artisans that are over the age of 55 find meaningful late life work.

This new program will debut in conjunction with the Town of Silver City’s proclamation declaring the week of September 24-28^th to be Silver City’s Employ Older Workers Week.

Mission Statement: To provide seniors and retirees with meaningful ‘later life’ employment utilizing their vast skills and experience while providing area employers a unique and valuable resource for their organization’s special projects or mentoring efforts.

Program Overview: The program will allow employers to take advantage of seniors’ skills, experience, work ethic, flexibility, and reasonable monetary demands, while providing the seniors a chance to stay active and challenged, leave a legacy, and earn needed money.

This initiative would be an attractive reason for retirees to chose Grant County for their home. It really does help “economic development”. Employers are crying out for more of a skilled experienced workforce. This is a win-win program.

The Program would utilize both partners’ resources and not require much actual dollar funding. (Except perhaps for outreach-flyers, open houses and workshops etc…).

o Dept of Labor has “ready made” data base and “branding” (read visibility) with area employers and job seekers, and the skills/knowledge to insure effective and efficient program policy and procedures

o Grant County Senior Services has the needed social links with seniors, an intensive deep knowledge of senior needs and desires, and a data base of volunteers that could be used for helping build our worker pool.

What follows is a story of the City of New York, hiring temporary skilled retirees to assist various City departments to upgrade various systems.

A SKILLED SENIOR WORKPLACE PROGRAM SUCCESS STORY:

From the Associated Press:

Ex-Professionals Return to Work for NYC

When Mort Sheinman retired in his mid-60s, he was managing editor of a major trade publication, and he'd spent more than four decades earning some well-deserved rest. Instead, the former Women's Wear Daily manager went right back to work. Ultimately taking a part-time job that used all his professional expertise and paid him just $10 an hour. New York City is hoping to find more ex-professionals like the 73-year-old - people who are either unable or unwilling to return to work full-time but who want to use their skills and stay in touch with the workaday world.

The city's Department for the Aging is launching a program to bring at least 100 such participants to work on short-term projects for city agencies. With a growing number of baby boomers approaching retirement with decades of active, healthy life ahead of them, organizers say the program could serve as a model for cities around the country.

The effort will be operated by ReServe, an organization that has been matching seniors with part-time jobs in the New York metro area since 2005. Participants, called ReServists, work about 10-15 hours a week for $10 an hour.

"The No. 1 benefit for any retiree is to do something that gets you out of the house," said Sheinman, who writes and networks for the Flatiron/23rd Street Partnership Business Improvement District. "I see it as an opportunity for me to go learn, for me to keep learning things."

The city hopes to spend $1 million per year on the project. Organizers envision asking retired marketers to help the Health Department plan outreach campaigns on health risks, while ex-educational advocates could guide juvenile detainees back into the school system. The success of the program will depend on the interest of the city's agencies, which will have to propose projects in order to receive workers.

For some of the seniors, the stipend is more than a token sum. One participant, an architect's assistant who lost her job when her boss retired, found it impossible to find employment at her age, recounted ReServe's executive director, Claire Haaga Altman. The paycheck from the program allowed her to buy necessities.

The story underscores the difficulty many older professionals have finding new full-time work once they approach or pass retirement age. About 80 percent of participants have no acute need for the stipend, Altman said. But the compensation, which may seem paltry to some, serves to remind employers and ReServists that their work is both valued and valuable.

"It dignifies the work," she said. "Volunteers often get shunted to stuffing envelopes." Many ReServists find their assignments allow them to explore new facets of old skills. With the nation's population aging rapidly, such programs could help fight what some fear could become a baby boomer brain drain. By 2030, one in five U.S. residents is expected to be 65 or older.