Retirement: it doesn’t have to be “either-or”

When we try to gaze into the future of the workplace, the crystal ball is hazy.

On the one hand, we hear about worker shortages. On the other hand, we hear that workers will have to—or want to—work past age 65 or any other arbitrary retirement age. We hear that older workers are great assets. Then we hear how difficult it is for many people to find work even in their 40s and 50s.

There are some huge disconnects between the prognostications and the realities people find in their own lives.

Fortunately, those gaps are fertile ground for new ideas. The Boston College Center for Retirement Research recently published a brief on phased retirement. This concept opens possibilities for older workers continuing to work with their current employers while reducing hours or eliminating certain aspects of the job they are now doing.

Phased retirement has already made headway in many universities and businesses that use knowledge workers. Still, the concept has lots of rough spots. For one thing, phased retirement seems to be more appealing in white collar jobs. There’s always the problem of health insurance and pensions. It might be hard to apply phased retirement uniformly, as some workers are perceived as more valuable than others.

But none of those problems is insurmountable.

It seems fair to say that a better future for older workers (as well as younger ones) is a more flexible one.

More on phased retirement:
Workforce Management

National Older Worker Career Center

Rand Corporation, Elder Workforce

AARP Phased Retirement: Who Opts for It and toward What End?

Comcast Finance