Over the past 15 months, the stock market has wiped out $2 trillion in Americans' retirement savings, according to the Congressional Budget Office. And even before the financial crisis hit full force, a February 2008 survey by job site CareerBuilder.com revealed that nearly three out of five U.S. workers age 50 or older were planning to look for work elsewhere after retiring from their current jobs.

And that can put them into competition with candidates their children's ages, says Horne, because once an employee retires, he loses his seniority. "I have realistic expectations that I'm not going to be appointed vice president," he says.

As boomers struggle to resuscitate their careers and millennials flood the workforce, IT managers are having to rethink what it means to be an IT professional and to weigh the relative value of .

That's not always easy. For example, millennials have a tendency to eat, sleep and breathe Web 2.0 technologies, and the value of that may not be immediately clear to a hiring manager.

"When my boomer colleagues see me texting, blogging and using wikis, they see it as social" as opposed to work-related, says Brett Gardner Bonner, a 26-year-old engineering specialist at FedEx Corp. "But they're just tools I use to achieve higher results by gaining consensus and connecting with others."