The New Meaning of Retirement. ERIC Digest No. 217.

The 21st century may become known as the era of lifelong learning and lifelong working. Retirement, the end stage of a linear working life, may be replaced with a learning, working, leisure, working, learning life cycle. Forced retirements and early retirement incentives have contributed to the decline of expertise in the workplace. Inflation, increasing health care costs, and inadequate pensions are propelling older adults to remain in or reenter the workforce past the traditional retirement age. Retirement as permanent separation from the workplace is being replaced with the idea of bridge employment. (Bridging is a form of partial retirement in which an older worker alternates periods of disengagement from the workplace with periods of temporary, part-time, occasional, or self-employed work; the key aspect of bridging is that it is work in other than a career job.) With declining birthrates and an anticipated shortage of new entrants to the workforce, early retirement will become an issue for organizations to explore. Organizations will need to assess the consequences to profits and productivity of encouraging talented and wise elders to exit the workforce. Organizations need to rethink allocating opportunities to older workers as well as changing the attitudes and expectations of managers and younger employees toward an increasing number of older workers. For the adult education sector, the older worker will be viewed as an active agent negotiating various roles within the workplace. An investigation of the meaning of work in the lives of older workers is fertile ground for adult education research and provision. (Contains 28 references.) (KC)