A Second Life After Retirement | Baby Boomers must be flexible if they are looking for new careers
When it comes to retirement, plenty of media reports suggest that the Baby Boomers are a new breed.
Rather than traveling the world or puttering in the garden, the story line says, they’ll be starting new careers tutoring children or offering expertise on overseas development. But then there’s the other side of the working retirement: plenty of people are now heading toward 65 without enough money to retire, and without the skills to slip into a flexible, fulfilling new line of work.
Positions Wanted
A recent study by Rutgers University researchers found that just 51 percent of Americans are confident they will have enough to retire on. A full 32 percent say they have more credit card debt than retirement savings. Meanwhile, plenty of older people who thought they were sitting on a pile of savings in the form of a house have seen much of their equity drain away in the last couple years.
So what jobs will retirees find? Jo-An Gladstone, president of Selectstaff, a Framingham staffing firm that places workers in accounting, finance, light industrial and assembly jobs, said she already sees plenty of older workers looking for jobs, and some of them fit just fine into the positions that she has available.
But Gladstone said all workers, no matter their age, need to be prepared for a job market that isn’t exactly what they might wish for.
“In all areas now, if people are flexible, there’s more chance to find them work,” she said.
By “flexible,” Gladstone means workers need to be prepared to work odd hours, like 7 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. shifts, they need to be willing to commute more than a few minutes and they need to be ready for pay scales that may be lower than they expected.
Some of those requirements can be difficult for older workers, but an even more significant factor can be the fact that almost all jobs that workers can find through firms like Selectstaff are full-time.
Don Anderson, director of the Workforce Central Career Center in Worcester, which helps match unemployed workers with jobs, said many older workers want to drop down to part-time employment. But finding those jobs can be a challenge, he said.
“The labor market for part-time work is very different than for full-time,” he said.
Anderson said most jobs that employers bring to the career center are full-time. Companies’ outreach for part-time workers tends to be less formal, he said, and older workers may need to use their own network of contacts to find part-time positions like driving delivery trucks or working certain retail positions.
Retail jobs may be a good bet for some, like construction workers who need to step back from physically demanding labor but can put their expertise to work at a hardware store, he said.
Anderson said some older workers who come to the center after losing a job they held for decades may be able to train for something new. Still, if they don’t want full-time work, he said, it can be hard to find a job in many fields.
But that may change as Baby Boomers leave the full-time job market he said.
“Employers are going to be under increasing demand to keep the skills that those people have,” he said.
And both Anderson and Gladstone said it’s not just years of expertise that make older workers valuable in the job market. While some employers may discriminate against older workers, Gladstone said, others may discriminate in their favor, based on the idea that they’re actually more reliable than their younger counterparts.
“You have the work ethic of the older worker who was basically brought up that you go to work no matter what,” she said. “What we’ve found and what clients have found…when the older worker shows up, they’ll give you the full amount of time that they’re working.”
Anderson agreed that employers often perceive older workers as more responsible. And, just as importantly, he said, many people with years of experience in the workplace have developed the ability to work with customers and coworkers without letting sparks fly.
“They see enough, if they’re sharp, they see there are certain ways you can get things done,” he said. “There are really some good strengths to market for older workers, ways to present themselves.”
WBJ Web Partners
Most Recent
Most Recent
0 Comments