Connecting Boomers, Competencies
and Tasks — Meaningfully
I used to build brands. Today I build bridges.
What I first thought was just a phase has, over the years, become my central theme: how boomers, competencies and tasks can be brought together meaningfully through better relationships.
Relationship is not a soft skill. It is the foundation of value creation.
We live in a world that changes before we have understood it. It is precisely in this world that I focus on what remains: the strengthening, stabilising and safeguarding resources of boomers. And on the question of how companies can put their brand into relationship with them.
Employer branding ends where the relationship begins. Human capital is mobile. Relational capital is not. Knowledge can leave. Loyalty, identification, tacit knowledge – they only grow where real relationships grow. No relationship, no bond. No bond, no value creation.
Generations are not opposites. They are potential.
I am committed to this on two levels.
On one, in the employment and recruitment of boomers as the last generation of Analog Natives – people whose skills were still formed in a real, human, analog world.
On the other, in connecting those resources with the virtual and data-based competencies of the first Digital Natives. Not alongside each other. With each other.
Knowledge only lives when it is passed on.
Experience that is not shared is dead capital. Knowledge, by contrast, is the only asset that multiplies when you give it away. In that spirit, I keep going.
Boomer Talks
Three Talks. Three Shifts.
Every day, experienced employees leave organisations – taking with them everything they have learned, lived through and internalised over decades.
When theoretical knowledge and digital tools reach their limits, experiential knowledge regains weight – and relevance.
New possibilities are opening up to put this knowledge to active, targeted and meaningful use.
As the pioneer generation of the 21st century, Boomers will not let these opportunities slip. As today's seniors, they are no longer a model heading for discontinuation.
Sixty years ago, not everyone wanted to grow up the way their parents had. Sixty years on, it looks as if many now also don't want to grow old the way earlier generations did.
Back then, they refused the conventional path into adulthood. Today, they are questioning the conventional retreat into retirement.
Boomers are robustly equipped for such transitions. They are not only the largest generation ever to step off the Swiss labour market. They will also live longer than any generation before them.
For employers who join this shift in retirement with a new offering for older professionals, entirely new perspectives emerge on both sides – from company to person (B2C) as much as from person to company (C2B).
The Talks are aimed at pacemakers in HCM, People, Development, Innovation and Culture – and of course at ourselves. Each Talk runs about 75 minutes: 45 minutes of impulse, 30 minutes of cooperative thinking-together.
So no monologues – dialogues.
More information? Just drop an email.
1
Boomers in the Third Act
The new space for different perspectives
They were the protest generation. Then the performance generation. Now Boomers are stepping onto territory nobody has charted before them: the third age – and they are inventing it as they go.
Between working life and advanced old age, a new chapter of 20, 25, sometimes 30 years is emerging. A third act for which no classical life biography has made provision. A free space that this generation is entering – for the first time in history – in this duration, in this state of health and with this purchasing power.
The English motto for the shifts described in this chapter – Add a new age to life – invites a comparison between growing old yesterday and growing old tomorrow.
Views on Ageing YESTERDAY
Feet up, everything taken care of
Views on Ageing TOMORROW
Make more out of more years, late freedoms
For too long, old age has been told as a story of deficit: cost centre, care case, pension burden. This generation no longer accepts that narrative. It refuses to be patronised – and is beginning to rewrite old age on its own terms.
Not as renunciation. Not as retreat. But as pioneers of a third life architecture.
What this means for the economy
The third act is not only a cultural event – it is an economic one. Millions of people are stepping into it with time, curiosity and compelling purchasing power.
With that come new needs, new trends, new offerings, new brands – beyond anything we have seen before. Travel, housing, discovery, learning, health, culture, mobility, nutrition, finance: almost every sector faces the task of fundamentally recalibrating its assumptions about the "older target group".
Those who continue to address this generation with imagery from the 1990s will lose them. Those who take their perspectives seriously will tap into one of the largest growth markets of the next two decades.
Boomers possess something that is often missing in younger years: composure without indifference. Courage without grandiosity. Distance without cynicism. When these energies feed back – into society, into organisations, into consumption, into culture – something larger emerges than a mere generational handover.
Perhaps not a loud movement. Possibly a quiet but enduring revolution.
Who this Talk is for:
Companies, brands, institutions and decision-makers who want to understand demographic change not as a ticking bomb but as a strategic field for the future.
2
Best of Boomers
Three strengths that experience sets free
Knowledge drain is not a future risk. It is happening now, every day, in nearly every organisation. Experienced employees are leaving – and taking with them what no job posting in the world will replace.
Boomers are the last generation to have grown up without the ubiquity of bits and bytes. This analogue imprint makes them unique – a living archive of capabilities from a world that is leaving us for good. In a few years, this legacy will no longer be accessible in the workplace.
But what exactly is it that this generation brings? "Experience" remains a vague term – as long as it isn't translated into concrete experience-based competencies. That is precisely what this Talk delivers: it makes a new Best-of-Boomers profile visible, nameable and comparable.
Three competency fields – one organic architecture:
DEEP SKILLS – the key competency.
Deep, experience-based capabilities: the intuitive recognition of patterns, undertones, warning signs. Judgement in unclear situations. Not acquired in a seminar room, but in tens of thousands of hours of practice.
ACTION SKILLS – the competency of self-organisation.
The capability to act, to take responsibility, to deliver reliably – without constant reassurance. The art of making decisions and standing by them.
ANALOG SKILLS – the competency of real life.
The capability to be effective where no screen stands in between. Presence, listening, negotiating face to face. The things AI will not replace.
Why this matters for HR
These three fields turn a diffuse age label into a strategically deployable profile. For HR planning, recruiting, competency management and succession planning, a vocabulary emerges that goes beyond blanket age stereotypes – and places experience-holders where they can actually create impact.
Boomers find themselves here at the peak of their effectiveness – not despite their age, but because of a depth and certainty that only decades of practice can produce.
In today's hyperfluid times, this is both a highly relevant and a widely underestimated HR potential.
Who this Talk is for:
HR leaders, people developers, executives and organisations that no longer want to leave experience to chance but to deploy it deliberately.
3
Boomers in Action
Meaningful tasks, roles and jobs
We live in highly volatile times. Upheavals in economy, politics, technology and society follow one another more densely than ever before. It is precisely in such phases that it becomes clear who can navigate crises – and who is navigated by them.
I have put it like this before: critical capabilities in critical times. This Talk shows where and how Boomers are being deployed today – and why their role could fundamentally change.
From senior to specialist
Boomers are no longer simply "the older ones in the company" or "those about to leave".
They are becoming a category of their own: capable, reliable, engaged – and flexibly deployable.
Organisations today and tomorrow need people for roles such as:
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Knowledge Anchor – someone who embodies institutional memory and secures continuity where turnover has become the norm.
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Mentor – someone who passes on to younger people what no handbook and no AI tool can convey.
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Crisis Navigator – someone who has already lived through several market crises and stays calm when others panic.
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Translator between worlds – someone who mediates between analogue and digital logics, between the new and the old.
Experience does not unfold value on its own
It only becomes capital once it is articulated, made visible and translated into flexible new forms of employment – project-based, advisory, part-time, cross-generational.
Many Boomers underestimate their own knowledge, because it feels self-evident to them. Yet it is precisely what feels self-evident that has often been hard-won over many years.
Purpose as drive
Meaningfulness in later years is not a soft factor. It becomes the decisive drive, the fundamental energy for taking part and taking action.
With their heightened end-of-life awareness, this generation does not want to leave behind a Teflon existence in the time remaining – but perceptible traces and pathways, for themselves and for those who follow.
Purpose here also means a new understanding of ecology – a human ecology, one that calls for experience to be used and re-used, rather than squandered as it has been so far.
More circular economy, less throwaway society
A note worth adding at this point: experiential capital is a particular kind of capital – it is equity. You own it, you can share and "spend" it as often as you like. You keep it anyway – and it only grows.
Who this Talk is for:
Companies, associations, non-profits and leadership teams who want to examine concretely where and how experienced people in their organisation can take on new, meaningful roles – especially in times of upheaval and skills shortage.
Experience Becomes Service
WE SOLVE PROBLEMS WITH EXPERIENCE
The older ones have already lived through what the younger ones are only just going through. Instead of every generation starting from scratch, it makes sense to bring both sides together – more precisely, more easily, more productively.
That is the core of askaboomer: a service platform on which experience does not gather dust but circulates. Those who have a question, ask it. Those who have an answer drawn from tens of thousands of hours of practice, pass it on.
TWO SIDES – ONE BENEFIT
On one side, the providers of experience – visible, findable, approachable. On the other side, the seekers – companies, teams, communities, families, individuals.
Asking is always free. Boomers finance the platform themselves through a modest membership fee (monthly subscription under 10 CHF/EUR) – and in return receive the most valuable thing there is: real demand for what they can do.
WHY NOW
The times are unsettled. Supply chains, interest rates, energy, regulation, technology leaps, geopolitical fractures – planability is in decline.
Precisely then, we need people who have several crises in the rear-view mirror and stay calm when others panic. Their resource: critical capabilities in critical times.
For short assignments on demand. Project work. Interim roles. Part-time. Advisory. Mentoring. Exactly as both sides currently need it.
THE DOUBLE WIN
The older ones are in demand for longer, a little less lonely, participants again rather than spectators. The younger ones don't have to reinvent the wheel everywhere – and find a person who listens.
Yet to Be Proven
What I want to prove together with others is this:
The very first job-service platform that puts experience at the center as a human resource is not a utopia.
Rather, it is a strategic step to show that tackling the demographic challenge—including pension solutions—can also start with today’s new generation of seniors themselves.
The Last of Our Kind
Yuval Harari speaks about us as the last generation who remembers what life truly was like back then.
A world without smartphones, algorithms, AI, and likes. When human attention was not yet a commercialised product. When it could take days or weeks for a letter to reach its recipient.
A spirited look back at analogue civilisation – and a look ahead at what will be lost in a fully digitalised world.
Deep Skills
A text on the strengths of experience-based skills will
follow by end of week.
Childless Future
More and more elderly, fewer and fewer children.
Stephen Shaw has gathered voices, images and conversations from around the world on the global scale of the new childlessness.
Those who take the time will be rewarded with a sharper view of the future.
We continue to live in highly explosive times.
Demographic change is an iconic part of this – but it is not a ticking bomb.
Rather, it is a highly urgent challenge: to give alternative ideas and impulses on growing older more room now.
To develop new visions.
To rethink the world of work.
To activate experiential knowledge – instead of letting it go.
I welcome exchange – E-Mail
Personnel Marketing and Societal Ageing – My professional experiences in the late and postcareer years
BMW: Human resources development in the form of an inside-out service strategy for the brand's key functions in direct customer contact – Lufthansa: Strategic definition and implementation of the competence brand "Lufthansa Service Professionals" to strengthen recruitment and personnel development – powerAge Foundation: Founder and long-standing director of the Basel-based powerAge Foundation as a think tank for innovative and alternative forms of ageing in business and society – Pro Senectute: Conceptual development for bundling services for people in the new younger age bracket between 55 and 80 under the brand "AVANTAGE" – HSG: Graphical formalization.to the demographic strategy group at the University of St. Gallen on the model of the "third age" as a preliminary stage of the coming seniority – AAL Forum and Generali Zukunftsfonds: Presentations and keynotes on the challenges of the retirement society at annual meetings in Brussels and Cologne – ExpAct: Partner in the three-year EU research project on the
definition, transmission and application of experience-based skills of the pioneer generation of boomers – together with ZHAW Zurich and the University of Innsbruck, among others – Politics: Participant in expert panels on societal ageing at the Federal Chancellery under Angela Merkel – on topics such as "Germany – Thinking a Generation Ahead" and "How Do We Want to Live?"