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Encore, encore: Career changes for Baby Boomers
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Marc Freedman
Yesterday's post about the likelihood that more and more Baby Boomers will no longer have a working career with a single employer begs the question: What will it be like to find that next job when you are in your 50s or 60s or beyond?
New research by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College shows that fewer than half of older male workers are still with their age-50 employer, down from 70 percent in the early 1980s. This drop in career employment means that more older workers face the challenge of finding a new job.
Boomers' thoughts about future employment are driven by a variety of factors. For some, economic uncertainty has affected the value of their retirement nest eggs, requiring a longer stay in the work force. For others, they're just fed up with jobs that they've had for many years and they just want to do something different with more personal value.
"During this economic downturn, Boomers should take pause and reflect on what they plan to do with the rest of their lives, and ask whether it's time to reinvent themselves by pursuing their dreams and turning their passion into 'encore careers,' " said Joan Strewler-Carter, co-founder with Stephen Carter of Life Options Institute. The Institute, in a press release, describes itself as "an organization dedicated to helping people plan for life after age 50."
Encore careers are defined as those that combine an income with personal meaning and societal value and include such jobs as teachers, social entrepreneurs and nurses.
"If you are going to have to or want to continue working, then why not pursue something that makes you happy--a career that you may have left behind many years ago when you met that fork in the road of life," Carter added in the press release.
The release cited MetLife Foundation and Civic Ventures, a national think tank, statistics that at least 5.3 million people ages 44 to 70 have encore careers.
An example cited by the Institute is a former IBM engineer in Maine who took an early retirement then began a new career as an artist.
Another example is a corporate lawyer who had collected American folk art as a hobby then turned it into a new career with a gallery he opened in New York City.
"Although I don't generate the same income I would have as an attorney, I believe that when your work is your passion you get a lot more out of it," he said.
Marc Freedman is CEO of Civic Ventures and author of "Encore: Finding Work That Matters in the Second Half of Life."
In the book he describes his vision of how active a role Baby Boomers could be playing in 2030: "The Boomers (in 2030) function as the backbone of education, health care, nonprofits, the government, and other sectors essential to national well-being. This group is serving as the glue of society in much the way women carried a whole set of caring professions in the first half of the twentieth century."
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