The Retirement Wave Is Not Coming. It Is Already Here.
The construction and facilities leadership community has been discussing the retirement wave for years as if it were a future event to prepare for. In the searches Matt Lesher is conducting right now, the wave has arrived. The vacancies opening at universities, health systems, cultural institutions, and owners’ rep firms are not hypothetical workforce planning projections. They are real searches, triggered by retirements that are happening now, and many of the organizations facing them are underprepared for how difficult the replacement process is.
The structural reason is straightforward. The generation of facilities and construction leaders who built their careers in the 1990s and 2000s is aging into retirement simultaneously. The pipeline of candidates who developed deep institutional experience in the ten years that followed is thinner, partly because hiring froze during the 2008 recession at the exact moment when that cohort should have been building senior-level exposure. The result is a gap between the roles that are vacating and the candidates available to fill them.
