Tuesday, August 26, 2014

Encore Jobs a New Trend in Retirement


When Patricia Visser decided to retire after 30 years in publishing and promotions, she had no idea she would be asked for an encore.

The then 60-year-old Toronto mother of five didn’t plan to re-enter the workforce, having saved wisely, sharing household expenses with her youngest daughter and feeling that she was naturally approaching the end of her working life.

“Most of my work was by choice with smaller enterprises. I didn’t want a 30-year job at Bell or Ford,” says Visser, who published entertainment and trade magazines and did marketing for various firms over the years.

Visser didn’t have a company pension plan, but lived modestly in a co-op apartment and saved enough to retire a bit early.

“I thought after 30 years that I’d been working forever,” she recalls with a laugh.

Instead, now 78, Visser has been working since she retired, from health research to helping small publishing startups. She is part of the trend where those ready to retire take “encore jobs” — launching a second act in the workforce rather than taking conventional retirement.

In fact, there are more older workers than ever before. They are staying in the workforce longer — some because they need to, but also because they want to. Today, 3.6 million workers are age 55 and over, representing 20 per cent of Canada’s workforce, an increase of 1.2 million since 2006, according to Statistics Canada.

More than 650,000 people are 65 and over with paying jobs — more than twice the number as in 2006.

In Visser’s case, “that breather from my career didn’t last long — maybe a year or so — before someone called” to see if she’d be interested in doing research into cancer prevention for York University. That led to doing surveys across the country on a wide range of topics like melanoma and even on the recreational drug use of people in their 60s.

“That was a wild one, but it was interesting,” she says.

“I really like working on projects that I think are worthwhile,” notes Visser, who helped a small company publish a special series of books on Canadian prime ministers for elementary school students.

She says the beauty of her encore career is being able to choose her hours and days of work. The extra money — while less than her younger working days — also helps her enjoy other interests like the theatre and symphony.

“Retirement is evolving. You don’t want to sit in a corner playing with your fingers, and I don’t know how to knit. I wanted to stay home and read at first, but it’s a double-edged sword because you get rusty the less you do. So you want to be doing something, even part-time or on contract. It’s having the best of both worlds,” Visser says.

Life expectancy plays a big part in the encore job trend, so “it’s not surprising that this is happening,” says Gordon Betcherman, a University of Ottawa professor of social sciences with a focus on the labour market.

In 1970, the average life expectancy at birth in Canada was 69 years for men and 76 for women. By 2011, it had increased to 79.3 years for men and 83.6 for women.

“You’re likely going to be living longer so if you’re not physically spent and you can find work that is not physically demanding, why not try to keep on doing it,” Betcherman says.

“People are making the decision that they don’t want to sit around for 30 years” after traditional retirement at 65, he says. “And fewer people are able to count on pensions.”

Retirees who spend most of their lives in physical jobs tend to want to leave the workforce entirely, while those who do more knowledge-based work often like the content of their work but may not have liked the organization, Betcherman says, adding many will stay in similar fields or seek out other types of work in which they can draw on their experience.

“The big picture is that this is a good thing, because as the population ages we are going to be looking for workers.”

Statistics Canada followed a group of workers who were between 50 to 64 when they left their jobs. Ten years later, most had gone back to work. Just 32 per cent of men and 36 per cent of women did not.
 
Among those who left their careers in their early 60s, the agency found that 47 per cent of men and 41 per cent of women were re-employed during the next 10 years, and most did so within a year or two.

StatsCan also discovered that men and women who were separated or divorced were more likely than their never-married counterparts to be re-employed after leaving their long-term jobs. However, married men were more likely to be re-employed than never-married men, but married women were less likely to be re-employed.

Compared with Ontario residents, older workers living in Atlantic Canada were less likely to be re-employed after leaving their career, while those living in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and the Territories were more likely to be re-employed.

“I still want to be part of life and what’s happening,” says Visser. “Older people have a lot to offer.”

Today she works part-time in the Toronto offices of CARP (formerly the Canadian Association of Retired Persons) after a few years recruiting members to the group that advocates on behalf of older people.

Visser says her 60-year-old son — a self-employed web designer who is the same age she was when she supposedly retired — has no intention of leaving the working world anytime soon.
 
by Lisa Wright - Business Reporter - Toronto Star

No comments:

Post a Comment