If I had to hazard a guess I would say that most people in this position feel like they should get paid 50% of their previous salary for doing 20% of the work (and limiting their scope largely to mentorship rather than IC work), and with the combined scope reduction of both time and work performed, their employers would rather pay them even less than what a strict accounting of hours worked would indicate.
Not to mention the fact that if your organization is so lop-sided that you only have experts near retirement and juniors who actually need 20% or more of their time being mentored, you're facing an existential staffing crisis.
But effectively, yes, they're keeping high-performing older talent around so some hard won lessons rub off on the youngsters.
I always thought companies should spend more time broadly categorizing employee allocation. E.g. this year you're going to be 20% mentor, 20% strategic advice, 60% IC
Everyone wears multiple hats in a healthy company, and part of the ageism problem is that the only management-visible hat is "work produced."
I work at a small trade school as the training coordinator and this is something I come up against every day. Our employers locally desperately need people but have no one to spare for training. It’s a really vicious cycle. As an example we are running a pre-employment program in January for youth. It’s a great program, 8 weeks long, the students are paid by the govt, they get employment readiness skills, tool skills, job shadow at four different businesses for a day each, and then have a two week work experience at one of the locations. The employers get paid too! Out of 18 original employers, 10 have backed out citing too busy. Yet they are all scrambling to hire people.
I’ve been in this industry for almost 30 years. I’m off the tools now because I want to support my fellow workers and have them learn the safe way to work, also my knees haha. But seriously though, we’re all struggling with way too much work and not enough people, and the experts are retiring.
Also there are fewer young people in the rest of the world, the birth rate has declined worldwide.
Certainly for senior people there are probably one dayish a week roles that don't even have to happen every week. But now you're still essentially talking about being a consultant.
It's a little secret that actually many young people don't want to be mentored nor is it in the interest of companies. In contrast to the common narrative that older people are of great value to enterprises because of their experience in reality it's much better not to make use of it but let younger people make all mistakes again (often there also a lot of newer mistakes to make because technology or some other circumstances changed).
(I am being a bit sarcastic here but there's also truth to it).
Maybe the cost of a notebook computer or other device, if required. And business cards, if anyone still uses those. What else?
edit: possibly some training costs, depending a lot on the type of job and the previous experience of the worker
That just doesn't apply to the vast majority of employees.
It also slows the economic shock of depopulation. Now it won't hit until most of the non-retired people start to die.
I do know some folks who have, instead, semi-retired (go in one or two days a week). People at the end of their careers have lots of experience to pass on. And it seems to keep them active and healthy. I wonder why we haven’t seen a growth in 1-2 day a week mentorship roles.