A Strategic Planning Alert: The Changing Face of America

One of the tasks all strategic HR pros are assigned is paying attention to demographics. This is a major part of the "environmental scanning" that needs to be done if you wish to be proactive in your HR. Well here is a major tool that everyone should download The Brookings Institution Report. The report on the population figures from 2000-2008 and the changing demographics. Some of their findings include:

• About 83 percent of the U.S. population growth since 2000 was minority, part of a trend that will see minorities become the majority by midcentury. Across all large metro areas, the majority of the child population is now nonwhite.  
• The suburban poor grew by 25 percent between 1999 and 2008 — five times the growth rate of the poor in cities. City residents are more likely to live in "deep" poverty, while a higher share of suburban residents have incomes just below the poverty line.  
• For the first time in several decades, the population is growing at a faster rate than households, due to delays in marriage, divorce and births as well as longer life spans. People living alone and nonmarried couple families are among the fastest-growing in suburbs.
• What used to be white flight to the suburbs is turning into 'bright flight' to cities that have become magnets for aspiring young adults who see access to knowledge-based jobs, public transportation and a new city ambiance as an attraction.
• Ten states, led by Arizona, surpass the nation in a "cultural generation gap" in which the senior populations are disproportionately white and children are mostly minority.

Depending on where your company is will determine how you react to this data. But react you should. Pay attention to this data and think about the following;

1. How will this affect our future recruitment?
2. Does our employee population reflect the general population from which we draw our applicants? If the answer is NO, can we at some time be accuesed of discrimination?
3. What will the dynamics of our employee group be when the "majority" becomes a minority?

Those are just some starting questions. I will be discussing my views on some of their findings in the coming weeks. So stay tuned.