Thank you for the question. It's an excellent one to really focus on and highlight what's been working.
Something we at Build a Dream have really found is that our investment into our retention and advancement has alleviated a bit of what I was speaking about, how that mid-level worker is what's really pushing. On the heavy end of things, on the retirement side of things, there are a lot of individuals, especially if you're working for a small and medium-sized business.... I can't even begin to describe how many times I've worked with employers who have fewer than 20 people, and there's an employee who's highly skilled and highly trained but unable to retire because they are the only person who holds that knowledge. You have that person on one end, and then you have these young, eager high school students on the other end.
The issue is that because nobody's supporting these young, eager students and youth, etc., through that mid-level phase in transitioning into that leadership pipeline, the more senior workers who are close to retirement are actually unable to leave. They want to enjoy retirement, more often than not, but because they can't rely on the youth and the students to, within three months, pick up all of the skills and knowledge that took 20 years to build, we're seeing that big gap there.
Definitely more investment into the retention supports and the advancement supports would help ensure that those individuals—the youth and anybody in these more entry-level jobs—are able to progress through into mid-level careers without leaving the industry entirely.