Economic-development officials in Connecticut are fond of talking about our state’s highly skilled and experienced workforce — and by all objective aggregate measures that is accurate.
For example, 42 percent of all workers in Connecticut companies have at least a college degree (associate’s or higher), compared to a national average of 37 percent.
But another metric casts our workforce in a slightly different light — a golden hue, perhaps?
That’s because the average age of Connecticut workers is rising dramatically — and has been for two decades.
According to the July edition of the Connecticut Economic Digest, a joint publication of the state’s Department of Labor and Department of Economic & Community Development, overall labor-force participation and employment-to-population ratios have risen since their lows of eight to 10 years ago. During this same period, the median age in Connecticut had risen to 40.9 in 2017 — sixth-highest in the U.S.
Total employment in Connecticut peaked in 2008, according to the DOL report. At that time, 13 percent of the state’s workforce was under age 25, 20 percent over the age of 54, and the remaining 67 percent fell between ages 25 and 54 (also known as “prime” age).
In just a decade those proportions have shifted dramatically. By the third quarter of 2018, overall employment stood at 99 percent of its peak a decade earlier. More significantly, the share below age 25 fell to 11.5 percent, the prime-age cohort slipped to 62 percent — and the group over age 54 swelled to nearly 27 percent — a 30-percent increase in the proportion of older workers in the Connecticut workforce.
According to the report by DOL economist Matthew Krzyzek, the demographic shifts of the most recent decade continue trends that began even earlier. For the year 1998, the share of Connecticut employment for those three age cohorts was (from youngest to oldest) 13, 74 and 14 percent, respectively. That means that in the last two decades the portion of the workforce in “prime” age is down 12 percentage points — while the portion over age 54 has nearly doubled.
Ages of industry
The industry groups with the largest percentage of workers under 25 are Accommodation & Food Services, Arts, Entertainment & Recreation, and Retail Trade. Nevertheless, two of these three sectors — Accommodation & Food Services and Retail Trade — saw their share of youth employment fall by 6.5 and 4.8 percent, respectively, between 2008 and 2018. Youth employment in Arts, Entertainment & Recreation grew by 4.9 percent over the same period.
The major industry group with the largest share of older workers is manufacturing, where 35.4 percent of workers are over age 54. In the same industry just 6.5 percent of the workforce is under age 25. This bolsters the widespread narrative that young people are shunning employment in the manufacturing sector — and that the inability to replace older workers departing the workforce is severely constraining the ability of Connecticut manufacturers to compete.
Beyond manufacturing, the Connecticut industry groups with the highest proportion of 55-and-older workers is Utilities (34.7 percent) and Public Administration (31.8 percent). (The smallest proportion of older workers are found in the Accommodations & Food Services, Retail Trade and Arts, Entertainment & Recreation industry sectors.)
As the proportion of older workers in Connecticut across many industry sectors, Krzyzek observed in the Digest, “knowing which industries have a large share of these highly experienced workers is important to ensure that their needs are met and that an adequate pipeline exists to help train incoming workers to replace those who will eventually retire.”
