The perfect storm: 5 strategies to close the succession gap

The biggest threat facing credit unions today is not artificial intelligence or even the pace of change. No the biggest threat facing credit unions today is the missed opportunity to invest in developing the next generation of leaders equipped to guide you through unprecedented change.

Think about this: Every single day in 2025, 11,400 Americans turned 65—Every. Single. Day. And by 2030, every member of the baby boomer generation will have turned 65 and be eligible to walk out your door and retire. These boomers take with them the knowledge, expertise, and the confidence to lead through uncertainty.

At the same time, companies like Microsoft and Salesforce are setting the example that smaller organizations, including credit unions, are following—replacing most entry level job opportunities with artificial intelligence. While they’re saving costs they’re cutting off the leadership pipeline.

Because the two questions every senior level executive and board of directors should be asking right now is: Who is going to lead our credit union in the next five to ten years? And what are we doing now to get these future leaders ready?

While executives are busy automating the present, they are quietly destroying the future. The entry-level roles being eliminated today aren't just jobs—they are the first rung of the leadership ladder. Combine that with the mass exodus of experienced leaders eligible for retirement and you have the perfect storm creating a massive succession gap.

A perfect storm occurs when multiple independent problems converge at the same time, creating a combined impact far worse than any single factor would produce on its own. That is exactly what is happening in today's workforce—and the conditions couldn’t be more of a threat to today’s credit unions.

In 2025, AI was directly responsible for nearly 55,000 layoffs in the United States, according to consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas—part of a staggering total of 1.17 million job cuts that year, the highest level since the Covid-19 pandemic. As of April 2026, over 92,000 tech workers have already been let go, bringing the cumulative total to nearly 900,000 since 2020.

The companies leading this charge read like a Fortune 500 roll call. Citigroup expects its headcount to drop by roughly 20,000, saying automation and AI-enabled systems will allow it to run with fewer employees. UPS announced massive cuts under its "Network of the Future" initiative. Paycom laid off more than 500 employees after automating payroll functions—and told those workers directly that their roles had been replaced by AI-driven systems.

But here is the real issue and why this is so concerning. It's the entry level that is disappearing fastest. Entry-level job postings dropped 7% year-over-year between August 2024 and August 2025, while senior-level postings actually increased by 4%. Big Tech companies reduced new graduate hiring by 25% in 2024 compared to the year before. In San Francisco—the epicenter of the AI revolution—more than 80% of so-called "entry-level" jobs now require at least two years of experience.

At the very same moment companies are cutting the front door to leadership, they are losing the senior talent they have spent decades developing.

The baby boomer generation—born between 1946 and 1964—represents one of the largest and most experienced segments of the American workforce. And they are leaving. Fast. Between 2024 and 2030, 30.4 million baby boomers will turn 65. Currently, one in four U.S. workers is a boomer, meaning as much as 25% of the entire workforce could retire within the next eight years.

And while artificial intelligence can replace the labor, it cannot replace the wisdom, experience and critical thinking skills needed to lead in these companies. Boomers are the people who know how things actually work, and have seen the company through some of their most challenging times. They are the institutional memory, the relationship holders, the culture carriers, and in many cases, the leaders who have been holding organizations together for decades. The are also the leaders best qualified to be developing this next generation.

With so many Baby Boomers turning 65, and many announcing their retirements, you would think there were be a major focus on succession planning. But there’s not.

While 86% of leaders believe succession planning is critically important—only 14% think their organization actually does it well. And less than 35% of organizations have a formalized succession planning process at all.

A full 65% of companies don't even have a succession plan for their CEO, let alone for the middle managers, top sales performers, technical experts, and culture carriers who are equally essential to organizational survival.

The financial consequences of this gap are already being felt. Gallup estimates that poorly managed leadership transitions have erased nearly $1 trillion in market value across S&P 1500 firms. Unplanned CEO departures lead to an average 20% stock drop. And 50% of leadership transitions fail within 18 months when proper planning hasn't taken place.

Not to mention the impact on employee and customer retention, productivity and overall moral and culture due to constant leadership disruption and turnover.

There is a pattern in how companies have historically produced great leaders. They have been mindful, intentional, and required training and development of the future executives.

Taking an entry level job would mean you do the low level jobs to cut your  teeth, get experience. You make mistakes, you learn, go to training, and you work with a mentor.

These young hires would roll up their sleeves and learn how the business actually functions—through training, experience, and spending time watching and talking with current successful leaders. Then, slowly, they move up. By the time they reach a leadership position, they understand the organization from the ground up, and they have the critical thinking skills to run the company. Time and resources have been invested in getting them ready for a leadership position.

CEOs like Doug McMillon of Walmart started by unloading trucks. GM's Mary Barra began on the assembly line at 18. Hewlett Packard Enterprise's Antonio Neri started as a call center agent. Talk to many of credit union CEOs, and you will find they came up through the ranks and starting out in those important entry level positions. These are not feel-good stories. They are evidence of how leadership pipelines are supposed to work.

AI is disrupting that model in ways most organizations haven't fully recognized yet. When entry-level roles disappear, so does the traditional pathway that grows future leaders. As well as the pool of future leaders for organizations like credit unions to recruit.

Less than 18% of leaders today feel they are effective at achieving business goals, and 82% of managers entering positions have received no training or mentoring at all. Combine that with the lack of succession planning and you realize why less than 14% of organizations feel prepared to address future leadership gaps, and 9 out of 10 human resources officers say their leadership pipeline is not ready.

One of the most important things to understand about the succession gap is the depth of it. No longer, is succession planning just about the CEO, or limited to the C-Suite. You need to be creating a culture of succession and create leaders at every level of your organization.

Because in today’s marketplace there is little that you can control, but the one thing you can—the quality of your team—is your greatest asset in turning uncertainty to competitive advantage.

Think about the people in your organization who, if they walked out tomorrow, would leave a hole that couldn't easily be filled. It might be your top relationship manager who has relationships with your 20 biggest members. It might be your operations manager who knows exactly why the system works the way it does—and what will break if you change it. It might be the IT leader who somehow keeps everyone together when things get hard.

These are not people who show up on most succession plans. But they are precisely the people whose departure can quietly unravel your credit union.

The data is clear: 77% of organizations already lack sufficient leadership depth across all levels. And without the entry-level pipeline feeding in from below, and experienced leaders draining out from the top, the middle is being hollowed out faster than most companies realize.

The good news is that the succession gap is not inevitable. It is a choice—it can be easily closed with the right strategy, commitment, and leadership.

We are living through a workforce transformation unlike anything in modern history.

The perfect storm is already forming. The only question is whether your credit union will be caught in it—or whether you will take action to invest in a leadership bench strong enough to leverage it.