Baby boomers spent their working lives assuming they would retire at age sixty-five with stable benefits and adequate savings. For many, significant changes in society and the economy made this impossible. Globalization, economic downturns, and rapid changes within industry and business moved the goalposts.
Today, many retired boomers work to supplement their pension incomes. Some do this by necessity while others choose to work, as Sandra Konrad discovered after interviewing forty working boomers.
Some cannot imagine giving up hard-won careers after a lifetime of work. Others start hobby-based home businesses or offer their skills as consultants. All have equally valid reasons for still working at an age when their generation thought employment would be unwanted-or even impossible.
Join Konrad as she explores the possibilities of working past retirement. You'll discover the benefits of having a steady income to augment personal savings, some of the many reasons to work past retirement age, and the diverse challenges and opportunities for older people in the workplace.
The stereotypical picture of retirement was an invention of the last century. Now our definition of retirement is changing again, making room for work while still realizing our personal dreams and enjoying financial security.
About the Author: Sandra Konrad holds a graduate degree in family-life education. She pursued a career in psychoeducation, and over the years, she has counseled people through divorces, family deaths, and debt crises; taught English as a second language; and offered support to immigrants to Canada.
Konrad is the co-author of a university textbook on counseling in Canada and has written feature stories for professional magazines. She interviewed thirty-five people for her unpublished book A Year Off in Your Fifties, a well-researched exploration of gap years due to unemployment, illness, or self-styled sabbaticals.
Like those she interviewed for Boomers at Work: Re/Working Retirement, Konrad discovered the need to reinvent her career in her early sixties, when circumstances made traditional retirement unlikely.
