More on encore careers

An ‘encore career’ was first defined quite specifically to mean a second paid career with personal meaning and social impact at a later stage of life. It was coined by American Marc Freedmen for baby boomers who want to work longer but at a somewhat slower pace and at something socially useful.
Marci Alboher tells her personal story of career reinvention and something of what she has learned since then, in an easy to read New York Times article, A switch at midlife, to make a difference, published in December 2012. The lessons she records are helpful for men and women in their 50s and 60s who are thinking about their work future.
Marci says she was taking a well-earned vacation and said ‘no’ when her boss asked if she would cut her trip short to take care of some work. She found herself looking for a new job, and knew she wanted to do something meaningful. She retrained as a journalist and now she is a vice president with Encore.org. She says the change can be hard work, it can take time – 18 months or more in which there is no income; it can mean retraining – and that too can cost; and it often means less pay than before, once you are earning again.
For her and others this has been well worth the effort but, as Marci points out, good and careful planning for this kind of change is crucial.
Since starting to explore this concept of encore careers I’ve come across a 2002-3 Australian research project by Jane Figgis, for the National Centre for Vocational Education. Jane’s project led to a modified and in some ways broader definition of an ‘encore career’. She found ‘what was imagined was not so much any particular field of work but the nature of that work’. People she spoke to expected it to be paid or unpaid work in which they held a fair degree of control, they wanted the work to be flexible in terms of the hours – leaving space for other activities. It had to involve a serious time commitment (averaging half-time over a year) for several years. And for many, to be attractive, it had to provide opportunity for learning. The project specified that this was about women and men who had reached or passed the age when they became eligible for the age pension.
In my research and interviews with older Australians there were many stories about job changes (see my book Baby boomers: busting the myths ). I asked myself which, if any, of these stories fitted the definitions of Marc Freedman and/or Jane Figgis? I found that while several women and men had taken on or continued to work in socially useful jobs, many had done so before they reached retirement age and others took on work that didn’t necessarily fit the socially useful category. Some were working in a voluntary capacity but not reaching the ‘averaging half–time and for three years’ requirements mentioned in the Figgis report.
Could the phrase ‘encore careers’ be stretched to cover these experiences? What happens if it slides into more general usage, to cover almost any downshift from a main job to something different, something lesser in terms of time and/or level of responsibility by someone in their 50s, 60s or 70s? Does it matter? Are there industrial issues here that would need careful thinking through? [See my previous blog on Encore careers and Doug Jacquier’s comments relating to the encore.org fellowship program] And what happens if employers begin to put pressure on employees to shift to lesser, lower paid jobs? Under what conditions might this be okay? How are those with less power and fewer options protected?
It is good to be having discussions about these and other issues raised by Freeman. I like many of his ideas. I think it is important to acknowledge – as he did in his discussion with Geraldine Doogue Too old to work too young to… on ABC’s Compass – that this time of life needs to be thought of as distinct from old age and from the early to middle years of adulthood. I find his willingness to think differently about work and jobs and how they are structured and designed refreshing. And it is always good to see an awareness that older people too like to learn new things.
Is an ‘encore career’ for you?