Feb 22 2008
Retirement In The New Age
The meaning of retirement living may be undergoing a serious change in the 21st century. Retirement normally connotes a period of rest and leisure at the end of the working cycle. In the new age with lower birth rates it may be difficult for people to retire without seriously affecting productivity. The meaning of retirement living may undergo a change. It may be substituted by the concept of continuous working in various stages of life for varying amounts of time. Retirement living may involve periods of work punctuated with periods of leisure and learning. Sheppard and Rix (1977) forecast that keeping older adults in the work force would make sound economic and social policy sense.
Due to inflation and rising health care costs, older adults are choosing to remain in the workforce past the traditional retirement age. Retirement living as permanent separation from work has become a matter of choice. The idea of bridge employment is coming in. In this model, older workers perform – temporary, part time occasional work activity. Bridging involves work in a job other than career. Career jobs take up a substantial portion of working life, usually under a single employer.
Bridging is often described as a second career. Reasons to return to work include the liking for work, financial need and to keep busy. Work is more than earning a living. It provides us a reason to live. Workers tend to remain in the workplace past the age of quiet retirement living because of better health, mental and physical and due to the need to remain occupied. Rix (1990) showed that older workers continued to work at peak capacity. There was proven to be more variation in work efficiency within age groups rather than between age groups. According to Farr, Tesluk and Klien (1998), there was no consistent relationship between age and performance across settings.
With declining birthrates expected to cause a shortage of workers in the coming years, the issue of early retirement has come into focus. There will be consequences to profits and productivity with the wise and talented elders exiting the workforce. There will be costs of supporting a talented nonworking population fully capable of productive work.
There needs to be a rethink on allocating responsibilities to older workers. There has to also be a change in the attitudes of managers and younger workers to the number of older employees. There is a growing interest in re-engineering the work environment to account for physiological aging changes. The concept of retirement living is changing completely. Only some positions in today’s society remain static and do not require continuous education.
Adult education has its own implications to the new concept of retirement living. Adult education views older workers as active agents capable of negotiating different roles within the workplace. The role might involve remaining in or parting from work situations or being in a position where they return to work in part time or full time jobs interspersed by periods of the traditional concept of retirement living.
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Tags: retire, Retirement, retirement living, retiring
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