Rick Cobb
Executive Vice President
Challenger, Gray & Christmas

In a recent survey conducted by Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the majority of human resource executives agreed that the most pressing issue facing organizations today is managing change. Things are not going to get any easier in the decade ahead with a “Perfect Storm” of change just on the horizon. A rapidly aging workforce, a shortage of skilled workers and an increasingly diverse workforce all promise to impact the way companies approach staffing, management and recruitment.

Among the questions companies will have to address: How do we manage a multigenerational workforce? Will there be an exodus of boomers from our company and how will it affect institutional memory? How do we attract new blood to our industry? How will the fact that women increasingly outnumber men in terms of earning college degrees impact our recruiting and retention efforts?

Companies that wait to address these issues when they occur will suffer a major loss in competitive advantage. The time to address the coming change is now. This presentation will provide the information and tools human resource executives will need to face the change head on.

Gene D. Cohen, MD, PhD
Author and Director of the Center on Aging, Health & Humanities
George Washington University

A myriad of negative myths, stereotypes, and misinformation has obscured our understanding of the aging brain and mind. To understand the true potential of workers and individuals in general in the second half of life, we need get the facts straight and learn about the latest findings from neuroscience research that point to the positive capacities of the aging mind in mid and later life. Gene D. Cohen, M.D., Ph.D., who previously directed programs on aging for 20 years at the National Institutes of Health and presently directs the Center on Aging, Health & Humanities at the George Washington University, will review a number of extraordinary new discoveries from the latest studies on aging that point to new potential for problem solving, creative expression, and psychological growth throughout the second half of life. He will draw upon information from his book “The Creative Age” (the first book on creativity and aging) and from his latest work “The Mature Mind: The Positive Power of the Aging Brain” (just released in January, the month the oldest of the Baby Boomers turned 60).

Jon Coppelman
Vice President
Lynch Ryan and Workers Comp Insider

This workshop will explore the intersection of two powerful forces: the aging of the American worker and the increased risks of injury that accompany the aging process. Substantially higher costs for workers comp insurance (and for self-insureds) loom on the immediate horizon for American employers.

We will examine data that demonstrates substantially higher incident rates and costs for specific injuries among older workers. We will also explore the proactive steps that management can take to reduce the impact of aging on workers comp experience.

The workshop will present case studies for discussion, highlighting the key decisions that confront management as workers grow older. The informal presentation format will provide ample opportunity for questions and discussion from the audience.

Dave Corbett
CEO/Director
New Directions Inc.

Rick Cobb
Executive Vice President
Challenger, Gray & Christmas

James Weil
Consultant, Aging and Retirement

Bill Arnone
Employee Financial Services
Ernst & Young

Ken Cool, PHD
President
Emeriti Retirement Health Solutions

The aging workforce is universal in that it permeates all levels of an organization. What’s not universal: the methods for dealing with the psychological and financial impact, needs and expectations of retirees from all levels. This panel discussion will cover what we know about the needs and values of various segments of the workforce, and some of the best practices for transitioning retirees, with examples from the executive suite to middle management to the lowest rank.

Deanna Garen
Senior Vice President
Prudential Financial, Inc.

As a member of the AGW Conference Leadership Committee, Deanna has been instrumental in helping to guide the overall development of the curriculum for The Aging Workforce Summit – not surprising, given her role in the development and implementation of Prudential Retirement's overall business strategy.

Deanna is a member of the Worldwide Employee Benefits Network and the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans. She is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for Human Capital magazine, and has appeared on CNBC, Bloomberg TV and a variety of other broadcast outlets as an expert source on retirement-planning issues. She has also been quoted in publications such as Plan Sponsor Magazine, Pensions & Investments, Defined Contribution News, and IOMA’s Managing Benefit Plans, and is a frequent speaker at retirement industry conferences.

In her opening remarks she will set the stage for presentations from leading experts in the issues of retirement funding, healthcare, work-life solutions, succession planning and the retention of institutional intelligence.

Charles H. Klippel
Senior Vice President & Deputy General Counsel
Aetna

GASB and FASB have already begun to change the way public and private employers view retirement benefits. As the future costs of post-retirement health care become more evident to consumers, it will change thinking about compensation, savings, financial planning and risk protection. This presentation examines individual and employer approaches to tax-favored retirement health savings and suggests ways in which employers and employees may consider allocation of wage and benefit dollars for retirement health care. It also looks at future products and services that may emerge from the insurance and financial services industries to respond to changing consumer and employer needs.

Christopher Matz
National Director
Group Long-term Care Insurance
Prudential Financial, Inc.

As baby boomers continue to dominate the workforce, do you know how much productivity your organization is losing due to their being present at work but taking time away to focus on caregiving responsibilities for both younger and older generations? Productivity losses to employers are greater than you may realize. One solution to bring focus back to their job is long-term care insurance. With current changes in Medicare and the recent passage of the Deficit Reduction Act, find out what’s on your employees’ minds that's distracting them from what you hired them to do and how you can get your “sandwich generation” employee back to full productivity.

Joel Rice
Of Counsel
Fisher & Phillips LLP

This workshop will focus on recent developments in age discrimination law, including the United States Supreme Court decision in Smith v. City of Jackson, which allows older workers to bring claims based upon disparate impact without any evidence of age-based motives on the part of the employer. The Supreme Court’s decision in General Dynamics v. Cline will also be discussed, in which the Court announced that the federal age discrimination laws do not prohibit older workers from being treated more favorably than their younger counterparts. The implications of these decisions for the large number of Baby Boomers in the workforce will be explored. Other topics covered in this workshop will include changes in the law pertaining to individual and group waivers of rights under the Older Workers Benefit Protection Act.

The informal presentation format will provide ample opportunity for questions and discussion from the audience.

Scott Sleyster
Executive Vice President, Full Service Retirement
Prudential Financial, Inc.

This year, the leading-edge of Baby Boomers is turning 60, and for the next 20 years 8,000 Boomers per day will hit that important milestone. The implications of this powerful demographic are enormous for employers and they are enormous for those individuals, as well! Will Boomers be financially prepared to retire? Do they know how to convert their retirement savings into a retirement paycheck? If the answers to any of these questions is “no,” then the assumption that Boomers will, in fact, retire “on schedule,” is faulty. And employers could be forced to decide how to redesign benefit plans for, and how to pay for, an older, more expensive workforce. As a recognized industry expert on retirement-plan design and funding, Scott will present new ways to design and structure retirement plans that can allow Boomers to retire—as planned—and employers to manage their workforces—as planned. Specifically, Scott will explain how behavioral finance, best practices from pension-plan management, and a focus on income-generation rather than asset-accumulation can achieve results that help Boomers retire and employers cope!

Jack L. VanDerhei
PhD, CEBS, EBRI Fellow
Employee Benefit Research Institute

The evolution from defined benefit to defined contribution forms of providing retirement income in the private sector has accelerated in 2006 as more plan sponsors are freezing traditional defined benefit plans and converting them to 401(k) plans. For the last seven years EBRI has been constructing two large-scale simulation models to project retirement income under 401(k) plans as well as predicting the probability of retirement income adequacy for current workers from defined contribution, defined benefit, IRAs, Social Security and housing equity. This presentation will show the baseline models as well as the impact of each of the following:
automatic enrollment for 401(k) plans
freezing of defined benefit plans
annuitization of defined contribution balances.

In addition, results of EBRI's new Ballpark E$stimate – Monte Carlo program will be summarized and their importance to the age-old dilemma of setting appropriate retirement income targets will be demonstrated.

• Spending on healthcare is substantial and increasing, but if we do not invest in new biomedical technologies, including innovative medicines, we will end up spending much more in the future.
  
  
• By investing in innovative medicines and other therapeutics, we can achieve healthier and more productive aging while avoiding the much greater costs of increasing hospital stays, emergency room visits and surgical procedures. Recent medicines for everything from HIV/AIDS to diabetes to mental illness are cases in point.
  
  
• With the cloning of the human genome – an exciting roadmap available to the biomedical community – we are on the cusp of new and targeted treatments.
  
  
• The challenge: We must think differently and work to reverse the overarching human and financial burden of disease rather than just the costs of treatment. By doing so, we can save lives and money – and increase society’s productivity.

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Steven A. Sass
Associate Director for Research
Center for Retirement Research at Boston College

An aging workforce is today’s reality. Tomorrow’s reality is an aging population that could easily overwhelm the nation’s fragile retirement income system. The retirement income problem is generally framed in financial terms. The solution, we’re told, is to increase contributions, raise the return on assets, and improve risk management. The retirement income problem, however, is in fact best viewed as a labor-market problem. More work and less retirement is easily our most effective response.

A key question, however, is whether employers will accommodate a significant extension in worker careers. Many pundits say yes. They say impending slowdown in labor-force growth, combined with the retirement of older workers with significant institutional knowledge, will make employers scramble to recruit and retain older workers. The effect of these changes on the demand for older workers, however, is likely to be less than the pundits expect. More important for employers is the very size of the pool of older workers, who are generally quite productive and will want to extend their careers rather than retire with inadequate resources. Accessing this pool of workers will require innovations in employer personnel and production systems. This need for innovation will slow the growth of employment among older workers—and reward employers adept at making such changes.

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The largest workforce segment also has the most richly-experienced technical and knowledge workers – and they are also retiring the fastest. The three major technical employers that comprised YourEncore’s inaugural partnership are among the first to tackle a science and engineering demand that far exceeds supply.

Your Encore is turning what some perceive as a liability into an asset by using the knowledge of a fast-growing population of retired scientists and engineers to help companies accelerate innovation through proven experience.

In this presentation, Brad Lawson will outline how Your Encore enabled these companies – and others – to retain and cross-utilize decades of scientific and technical expertise, and will explore some of the key statistics, risks and institutional barriers that many employers face.

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Robert Sinclair
Director, Accessible Technology Group
Microsoft Corporation

Christine Durst
CEO
Staffcentrix

Claudio Giugliemma
CEO
Qualilife SA

They say “with age comes wisdom”, but it can also bring bad eyesight, weakened hearing and loss of dexterity. The equipment our employees take for granted today can become cumbersome barriers to their efficiency tomorrow.

Employees who are members of the aging workforce (and who, really, isn’t?) need a variety of tools and work-related options to maintain their productivity. Technology often plays an important role in retention and on-the-job satisfaction. In addition, the use of technology opens up employee work options that would otherwise be unavailable to employers—e.g. working from home. Similarly, technology can be customized to meet the individual needs of employees—accommodations such as making documents easier to see and/or Web sites easier to hear/use. As corporations increase their use of technology and have the objective of keeping their workforce in place, technology provides a means as well as a tool to keep employees on the job and productive. This panel will provide information on technology accommodations and work options as well as corporate case studies.

Ed Vitalos
Associate Partner, Maturing Workforce
IBM Global Business Services

The statistics are clear: increasing longevity, better health, and the large size of the baby boom generation are creating an unprecedented shift in the age distribution of the world’s population and the global workforce. This generation of maturing adults, which has been responsible for 40 years of economic growth, is looking for new ways to work longer and redefine traditional views of retirement. And the supply of replacement workers is definitely not going to meet the demand.

And yet, many organizations have done little to date to prepare themselves for the impact of these fundamental changes within their current workforces as well as on the supply of skills, talent, and intellectual capital required to build and refresh them.

This session will focus on prevailing “Myths” that have grown up around the aging workforce in a number of key areas including:

• Do baby boomers really want to work forever?
• Have Human Resources Organizations already developed the solutions to these problems?
• Are outsourcing and immigration the panaceas?
• Given the fact that many of these shortages will not occur for another 2-3 years, don’t employers have plenty of time to react?

Drawing on IBM research into approaches for managing the impact of aging within its own workforce, as well as experience derived from assisting progressive employers through its Maturing Workforce Initiative and offerings, Mr. Vitalos will separate fact from fiction in these areas. He will also describe innovative approaches that these private and public sector employers are using to identify and assess the future business impact of aging on their employee population. These employers have already moved beyond the planning phase to the creation and implementations of realistic and effective response plans. The presentation will focus on their experiences and the emerging “good practices” available to employers for successfully managing the challenges of aging within their workforces.

George Castineiras
SVP, Retirement Income
Prudential Financial

When modern-day retirement plans like the 401(k) began to replace traditional pensions in the early 1980s, they were often presented to workers as “supplemental” plans that provided an array of attractive benefits, including “control,” “portability,” and the ability to “build a nest-egg.” In other words, the retirement industry—in its zeal to convince workers to save independently—moved very subtly away from perhaps the most important benefit of traditional pensions: retirement income. Now, as millions of workers rapidly approach retirement age, many have come to realize two fundamental truths: 1) the ability to generate income is a vital component to a successful retirement, and 2) Boomers need help to understand how to convert their nest-eggs into a stream of lifetime income. In his remarks, George will talk about new, cutting-edge programs and solutions that can help Boomers—and their employers—address this issue. In addition, George will present findings from two recent Prudential Financial surveys that examine the issue of retirement income, including not-yet-released findings that suggest even younger workers are eager to embrace the traditional pension’s concept of guaranteed, lifetime income!