NSW Government SageCentre (www.sagecentre.nsw.gov.au)

Message from Brendan O'Reilly, Director-General, NSW Department of Premier and Cabinet and Jim Moore, Chief Executive, NSW Department of Ageing, Disability and Home Care.

The NSW Government SageCentre is a resource for human resource practitioners including workforce planners, line managers with mature staff, and staff interested in work and retirement planning options.

The ageing of the population presents a significant challenge for us all, now and into the future:

• The public sector is on average 10 years older than the wider workforce. Forty-two percent of public sector workers are aged 45 years or over, compared with thirty-three per cent of the NSW workforce.
• Increasingly, there are fewer workers for every job and vigorous interstate and global competition for skilled and specialist public sector staff.
• Over the next decade, the public sector workforce will lose a substantial proportion of key workers and critical skills through retirement, which has the potential to significantly impact on direct services and areas of specialist expertise if no action is taken.

We encourage all public sector workers to use the valuable information and resources on the SageCentre. It will be of particular value for:

• Mature workers - to explore work options and prepare for retirement
• Line managers - to apply flexible work practices in order to retain and recruit key staff
• HR staff - to stay up-to-date on the labour market, case studies, tools, templates and resources to assist them in workforce planning, retention and management to meet the various challenges for our Public Sector workforce into the future.