More boomers planning next careers

A report from a US-based online newspaper, Columbus Dispatch.com on 8 June, says the following:

Efforts are under way in Washington as well as in corporate America to allow for phased retirements, given the unprecedented graying of the work force — as 76 million boomers, born from 1946 to 1964, march on.

According to Bureau of Labor Statistics projections, the number of U.S. workers 55 and older will grow 4.1 percent a year until 2014 — or at four times the rate for the labor force as a whole. Should older workers exit too rapidly, the talent drain from boomer retirements could hit some industries especially hard.

Research fellow David DeLong of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology AgeLab says his work shows that:

• • 50 percent of the federal work force is eligible to retire in 2006.
• • 28 percent of the nuclear industry can retire within five years.
• • 50 percent of registered nurses will retire in the next 15 years, just as elderly boomers step up demand for nursing services.
• • 66 percent of petroleum-industry engineers have retired, and there are few replacements for them in the educational pipeline.

Almost 80 percent of boomers 55 to 59 work full or part time, and 46 percent of those 60 to 65 are in the work force. DeLong says such figures give new “meaning to the New Yorker cartoon that asks: ‘Have you given any thought to what you plan to do after you retire?’ ”

Retirement’s reinvention was first detected by labor economists in the 1990s as the trend toward earlier retirement from the 1960s into the ’80s began to reverse itself, and older workers started using part-time, temporary and consulting work to phase out of full-time employment.

Joseph Quinn, a Boston College expert on older workers, dubs these “bridge jobs,” and his research suggests older workers want fulfilling, productive, creative work.

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