Passing the Baton to the Next Generation

Being a part of the post-war, baby boom has caused me to be flexible and adaptable. I have seen change come quickly and often and to say that change is a constant is an understatement. When touch-tone phones became popular, it was all I could do to get my father to replace his rotary dial phone. His generation had gone through the Great Depression and if something worked, you didn't even consider replacing it, no matter how much easier it was to use...When wireless phones replaced the touch-tone phones, it was anathema. When it came time to go to a cellular phone, my father was okay with using one, but someone else had to operate it. Most of the time he tried to listen to it upside-down.

I am now reaching my father's age. I work among people that have been doing things the same way for years, even though the method of product delivery has been automated. They have been left in a wake of younger, more adaptable practicants. The do not have the ability to judge how long it takes to do something and as a result, tasks take as long as the subordinates would like to take it. We are now entering the era of building information modeling (BIM) which gives attributes to digital elements and makes work even easier...But....it takes the ability to set things up correctly. Who is going to teach the upcoming generation, if someone doesn't know what to teach them? Sure, we can do "old school", but if it only partial satisfies the implementation of the new technology, who will fill in the blanks?

The next 10-years will be interesting as the Baby Boomers begin to approach retirement and the work-force will diminish. Will jobs of necessity go overseas, where they didn't listen to the zero-population nonsense? Will imigration continue to be the method of getting an entry-level workforce? It seems our "do-your-own-thing" attitude is going to bite us in the buttocks of our retirement, as we try to get someone to do those tasks that we can no longer do, because we haven't passed our wisdom and knowledge to a coming generation. Aqui se hablan Castellano.

But this is ......just an observation.