Chris Satullo: Do-good boomers out to rework retirement

By Chris Satullo, Inquirer Columnist

They're going to want to.

They're going to have to. And America is going to need them to.

So expect many baby boomers to keep working past "retirement age," a milestone that the generation's oldest members reach this year.

The nation's finances will demand this, as will personal pocketbooks. So will a labor market starved for skills.

As this huge cohort has done every time it entered a new phase of life, the boomers are going to rearrange the furniture.

It's surprising, then, that employers, government and Madison Avenue have done little to prepare for a world where the working septuagenarian will be the norm, not the oddball.

The notion of a leisurely "golden age" full of golf carts, Greek isles, and golden retrievers romping beside you on the beach was itself a Madison Avenue concoction. It was sold hard to "greatest generation" Americans on behalf of Sun Belt developers, financial firms, and employers eager to make room for the cheap, plentiful boomers.

Now, no surprise, boomers look to dismantle the retirement ideal they helped usher in. In a 2003 AARP survey, 68 percent of workers older than 50 said they intended to work in "retirement."

Make way for the encore career. The phrase, according to the man who coined it, Marc Freedman, describes "a new phase of life that's emerging between the end of midlife career and real old age."

The phrase just got a lot of play as the richest boomer, Bill Gates, moved from his first career - fiddling with ones and zeroes to change the world - to his encore career of battling poverty. His shift, from building wealth to sharing it, also is happening in lower income brackets.

The emblem for this new trend might well be a boomer in crisp Dockers standing on a corner and holding a sign: "Will work for meaning."

Freedman, a Philly kid who runs a California nonprofit called Civic Ventures, says boomers are flocking to jobs where the income helps, but where the real payoff is feeling you are making your corner of the world a better place.

Freedman penned his phrase after disliking others he had heard: "Like working retired. That's kind of like walking dead. Nothing aspirational about it. Encore career is a radically optimistic notion. You won't make more money or become more famous, but you might be doing the most essential work of your life, with heart and soul."

To be sure, financial need does fuel this yen to keep working into one's 70s.

Wobbly pensions, a shrinking Dow, and tanking home prices have unsettled many retirement plans. In a MetLife survey, the percentage of boomers who said they had enough money to retire at 65 fell from 56 to 34 in the first five years of this decade.

Social Security faces a notorious case of the shorts. This isn't because of mismanagement; the program just wasn't designed for a world where Americans live, on average, 12 years longer after retirement than in 1945.

But if boomers choose to work longer, many of Social Security's actuarial problems will ease, even melt away. To help that trend, government will have to revise some parts of entitlement, tax and pension law that nudge people toward early retirement.

Some workers will have to adjust attitudes long steeped in the ad-driven myth that retiring early - that is, ceasing to use many of your skills - somehow equals "winning."

Employers will have to rethink their ambivalence toward gray, which values the experience and work ethic but grouses about health costs and teaching "codgers" high-tech tricks.

The end of a buyers' market in labor should goad employers to take that second look.

Some of the starkest shortages are projected in the helping professions - teaching, nursing, counseling - where, Freedman notes, many former cubicle warriors would love to craft an encore career rich in meaning.

"These are fields desperate for human talent," he says. "Older workers are an undiscovered continent of talent."

But might this trend, as usual, favor those with diplomas over those with hard-earned calluses? It's a fair concern, Freedman thinks, but overstated: "Life skills, compassion are as important as a pile of letters after your name."

Still, as John Gomperts, a Civic Ventures colleague of Freedman's, told a Urban Institute panel in June: "The bridge from midlife careers to encore careers remains almost invisible to many."

The bridge is built out of training and chances to sample new types of work. How to find those at age 55? Ideas bubbling in Congress - such as "lifetime learning" accounts, enabling people to save for encore-career retraining the way they do for their kids' college - could help.

Whether such changes arrive quickly or slowly, the encore career is headed to center stage. Once the shock of an old myth's collapse wears off, expect employers, and the nation, to applaud.