A topic that’s come up a lot for me recently — at IMGIS, in conversations with different utilities, and even in a recent modernization-project RFP — is how quickly utilities are losing institutional knowledge due to retirement. It feels like almost every team I talk to is dealing with this, either as part of a larger project or as one of the drivers behind why that project is happening in the first place.
As I dug into this a bit more, I came across a couple of industry data points that really stood out to me:
A recent DOE-summarized assessment noted that nearly half of electric and gas utility employees would be retirement-eligible within a decade — and we’re now living through that decade.
A 2025 workforce analysis shows that almost half the utility workforce is already 45+, with many expected to retire within the next five to ten years.
One of the reasons this keeps coming up in my world is that modernization efforts are now exposing just how much the existing integration strategy relied on those long-tenured specialists who are retiring. When they leave, utilities often find that:
critical GIS–asset –operations syncs were custom-built years ago,
the person who maintained them was the only one who understood the logic and processes needed to keep them running effectively,
documentation never kept pace with system changes.
This is showing up even more clearly as organizations get deeper into UN upgrades, Maximo 9 projects, S/4HANA migrations, and other cloud-platform transitions. These efforts tend to bring all the “quiet dependencies” to the surface.
In other words, workforce retirement isn’t just a staffing challenge anymore — it’s becoming an integration strategy challenge.
I’m really interested in how others are seeing this play out. What kinds of impacts are you seeing as retirement rates accelerate across utilities, and how are you approaching them as you take on modernization work?