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How MITRE Supports its Mature Workers
By Bill Albright, Director for Quality of Work Life & Benefits
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MITRE Center in
Bedford, MA |
Last year I had the privilege of joining with Nike, a fellow member of Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” list, as a speaker at the Great Place to Work conference. The topic was “Retaining and Managing an Inter-Generational Workforce.” My focus was on how MITRE supports the mature workforce. It was nice to be invited to speak because it recognized MITRE as being in the lead on these issues.
We have a great story to tell about the value of the programs we have in place for mature workers. But, first, it’s important to understand why we do the things we do to support this age group.
The Challenge of an Aging Workforce
As a not-for-profit company chartered to work in the public interest for our government sponsors, we must provide agencies with technical excellence and “institutional memory.” To achieve this, our technical staff must have the right mix of practical experience, maturity, judgment, and information technology skills. With regard to maturity, we have a challenge ahead. Our workforce is aging, with many having retirement eligibility. The average age is 47, and about half of our workforce has more than 25 years of service. So to avoid jeopardizing one of our greatest attributes – institutional memory – we gave considerable thought to how we manage our wealth of knowledge and technical skills. Knowledge management improves our environment in a number of ways, including:
- Connecting people across the enterprise to facilitate the collaboration process
- Capturing and retaining a knowledge base to support the use of expertise and community knowledge
- Providing information technology infrastructure and services to support the management of the company’s intellectual capital
- Cultivating a corporate culture that provides incentives for the creation, sharing, and use of knowledge.
To help leverage our knowledge-sharing culture, we’ve initiated a number of programs and tools
that help our employees access and share
 
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