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.
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.