As 10,000 boomers a day hit retirement age, companies race to hold on to their knowledge

▶ ▶ Companies are working to ensure millennials are prepared to step into leadership roles ▶ ▶ Many are “unaware of how much tribal knowledge” retirees take with them

Vikram Ravinder was a little nervous as he faced the board members of Chicago nonprofit Bunker Labs in a conference room in early December. The 29-year-old Deloitte senior consultant for strategy and operations was pitching a plan that might help Bunker secure funding for a program enabling veterans to become entrepreneurs.

Ravinder developed the pitch, under Deloitte’s pro bono program,ram, with his mentor, Jonathan Copulsky, ulsky, the company’s chief marketing and chief content officer. The two meet regularly as part of a push to haveave senior managers train junior employmployees. Copulsky, who will retire inn June 2017 when he reaches the company’s mandatory retirementent age of 62, has mentored several youngerunger Deloitte executives. “I was able to put this guy in a position, give him enough ‘got your back,’ but also give him the freedom that he could be successful and coach him as opposed sed to directing him,” Copulsky says.

Ravinder’s presentation helped ed the nonprofit secure new funding. “I see how he approaches clients,” Ravinder vinder says of Copulsky. “Millennials bringring data and analytics, but boomers s have experience they can rely on when en the data isn’t sufficient.”

Companies from Deloitte to defense contractor BAE Systems, General eral Motors, and General Electric are scrambling to ensure millions ns of younger managers from the socalled millennial generation—those hose born from roughly 1981 to 1997—are —are ready to step into leadership rolesles as baby boomers bow out of the workforce. About 10,000 reach retirementement age every day. “Many large, older companies are caught up in a tsunami of baby boomers retiring and are unaware of how much tribal knowledge they are taking with them,” says Dorothy Leonard, professor emeritus at Harvard Business School. Leonard’s firm, Leonard-barton Group, developed knowledge-transfer programs at several GE divisions and at the nonprofit Educational Testing Service.

Until last year, boomers made up the largest portion of the U. S. population, and Generation X represented the biggest share of the workforce. Now millennials lead in both categories: They hold about 20 percent of all management jobs, up from 3 percent in 2005, according to U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

GE runs programs in its GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy and GE