Designing the Long Life

Advanced strategic-HR simulation set at Pennine Precision Group, a Sheffield precision-engineering manufacturer facing a knowledge cliff: 38% of its master machinists are over 55 and within a decade of retirement, and GBP 31m of revenue runs through lines that depend on fewer than 15 of them. As Workforce Strategy Lead, the learner is given a fixed labour budget of GBP 142m and four rounds to redesign a single-track career model for a multi-stage, long-lived workforce. Round 1 segments the workforce by life-stage (learning, peak, mentoring, exploration) instead of undifferentiated headcount. Round 2 funds a mid-career reskilling programme on a multi-year ROI rather than a single-year payroll view. Round 3 designs a phased-retirement policy that transfers tacit knowledge while keeping cost within the ceiling, and decides whether to decouple reward from tenure. Round 4 integrates the three decisions into a costed three-stage strategy and defends it ahead of a GBP 48m aerospace capability audit. The math punishes the five classic errors — headcount thinking, short-horizon budgeting, unfunded generosity, tenure-anchored reward, and letting tacit knowledge walk out the door — so wrong strategies underperform on the debrief KPIs: talent retention, reskilling ROI, age-diversity productivity, knowledge-cliff exposure, and total labour cost against GBP 142m.