Economic Developers Are Retiring: How to Address this Urgent Issue

2024 is a big year for retirement with an average of 11,000 Americans turning 65 each day. The “silver tsunami” is impacting all industries, including economic development. A simple Google search for “economic developer retiring” results in pages upon pages of announcements. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough trained economic developers to replace them and many organizations have not created a succession plan that accounts for training someone new to the industry. 

The Brookings Institute put an exclamation point on this issue in their report on the infrastructure industry as a whole. In “Seizing the U.S. Infrastructure Opportunity: Investing in Current and Future Workers” Joseph Kane wrote, "From 2021 to 2031, projections show 1.7 million infrastructure workers (12.2%) leaving their jobs each year on average, leading to huge replacement needs …. How can leaders expand the future infrastructure workforce if they cannot even hold onto the current one? Many infrastructure leaders have experience building projects, but far less in collaborating with workforce partners or recruiting and retaining talent.” The collaboration piece is where economic developers really shine. Take them out of the market place and there will be a lot of stalled projects and missed opportunities. 

Economic Developers Are Retiring: Take Steps to Address this Urgent Issue

In Golden Shovel’s latest whitepaper, “Securing Tomorrow: Succession Planning for Economic Development Leaders,” we present best practices and strategies that can be implemented by economic development organizations. These steps can be applied internally and also used as a guidebook when speaking with local businesses about their own success plan. Highlights include:

• Preparing for leadership transitions
• Ways to engage internal and external stakeholders
• Internal versus external hiring
• What to look for in a replacement
• How to make transitions smoother
• Resources to empower successors

Recommendations are also given for how to implement change across organizations after a leadership transition is complete. As Brittany Ashby, new President & Managing Director of The Align Team said of her transition, “Growth is exciting. It also requires us to do things differently.”