The New Post-60 Career Paths

When I turned 60 a couple of years ago, friends started asking about my retirement plans. This was shocking, given I’m just as healthy, energetic and curious about the world as I was at age 40. My parents lived until their 90s, so why on earth would I give up the most stimulating part of my life if I hope to live three more decades?

At the same time, my priorities were shifting in this later chapter of life. I wanted less stress and more time to process, create and mentor. I couldn’t see another decade in the pressure-cooker management job I’d had for years. I wanted to focus on what I loved most about the profession: reporting, writing and making an impact.

Like me, more people over 60 plan to continue working in the future—the share of workers 65 and over in the U.S. is expected to increase faster than any other age group between now and 2030—but no clear roadmap exists for how to do it. While I was lucky enough to have bosses who let me create a new reporting job, most companies don’t offer a choice between charging up the career ladder with full-time employment or jumping off the retirement cliff around age 65.

As life spans now extend toward 100, demographers, gerontologists, neuroscientists and employment experts are studying how to overhaul the workplace for the future to encourage people to work into the later stages of life. Companies are devising ways to taper down and deconstruct jobs by task, role or project to offer more options to older workers looking for more meaningful and flexible work. Benefits would be tailored to the needs of older workers—think unpaid sabbaticals and home grocery delivery—rather than just matching 401(k) funds. High-tech tools such as exoskeletons and robots are emerging to assist older workers in physically demanding jobs.

“The way we’ve set up employment is on Friday you’re at 100% and on Monday, after you retire, you’re at 0%. That’s not good for the person, and it’s not good for the company,” says Chip Conley, founder and CEO of the Modern Elder Academy, a school in Baja California Sur, Mexico, aimed at helping with midlife career transitions. “Why not create a staircase that allows people to ramp down over time?”

During the pandemic, a disportionately high number of older workers have retired early, aggravating a labour shortage. Many say jobs and salaries will need restructuring if employers want them back.

Employers need to acknowledge that older workers who have achieved life milestones have different career goals and motivations than younger people, Stanford University’s Center for Longevity found in the report “A New Map of Life: Work” published last year.

“Purpose is crucial for older workers,” says Alice Milivinti, a demographer and co-author of the report. “Younger workers will learn something new because they are told to, but older workers need to know, ‘Why should I take the time to do this?’ ” Older workers want flexibility in both the number of hours worked and the choice of tasks they perform. Some 60% of nonworking Americans in their late 60s or 70s said they’d be willing to return to work if they had flexible schedules—and about a fifth of those would take a more than 20% cut in hourly wages to do so, according to a study published in the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics in 2020, which cited a survey of 2,772 respondents.

Vanessa Liu, an entrepreneur behind SilverLife, an incubator for businesses addressing the aging demographic, is developing a platform that would break down jobs by tasks or roles to make them more attractive for older workers in the future. For example, a supervisor job at a manufacturing plant could be deconstructed into three separate roles: A troubleshooting job identifying problems on the assembly line, a team-management role and a product-development job. Hours and pay could be adjusted accordingly, allowing workers to move from 100% employment to 60% to 30% when they’re ready.

“Companies are realizing there’s just not enough new blood coming in, and they’re losing decades of experience walking out the door,” Ms. Liu said.

“This is a way to create a flexible arrangement for experienced workers to stay on and keep working at 65, 70, 75 and 80.”

Kerry Hannon, a workplace researcher and author of the upcoming book “In Control at 50+,” says intergenerational projects and teams that pair young workers with older ones will be important in the future. One way to do that could be through products like Mentor Cloud, which provides training and software for businesses to develop programs aimed at helping older workers transfer knowledge to younger people.

Working with young entrepreneurs as an adviser and investor has kept Linda Fayne Levinson, 80, fully engaged in the tech world while giving her the flexibility to set her own schedule. The first female partner at McKinsey & Co. in 1978 and later a venture capitalist and public-company director, she shifted to mentoring startups and serving on boards of directors for several private companies about eight years ago. “This lets me give back, but now I only work with people I really like and trust,” she says. “I say what I think, and I keep people calm in a crisis.”

The shift to more contract and gig work will require a new benefit structure for all workers who want to work independently by project but need benefits that are generally only available to full-time employees, says Kathleen E. Christensen, a social scientist and authority on the changing nature of work. Workers rights are still governed by the Fair Labor Standards Act, established in 1938 and set up for traditional full-time work. New laws and organizations will be needed to provide benefits for future contract workers perhaps by project or role. “We’re in transition right now in the social contract with the infrastructure that will be needed to support contract workers in the future, both old and young,” she said.

Benefits will also need to be more in sync with older workers’ priorities, which can be far different than those of younger workers. Pam Jeffords, an employment expert who advises companies on diversity and inclusion for Sapient Insights Group, envisions a new range of benefits and incentives where workers will be able to choose options such as grocery delivery, long-term-care insurance, unpaid sabbaticals and the option to be a consultant for various projects throughout the year.

Despite years of discussion about accommodating an aging workforce, the topic is still taboo for many. “People don’t want to self-identify as older. They don’t want to be stigmatized as slowing down,” Dr. Christensen says. A 2020 AARP survey of 5,598 employers in 36 OECD countries found 53% of global executives don’t include age in their diversity and inclusion policies.

In his new book “The Super Age,” demographer Bradley Schurman says emerging technology for physical labour will help the aging population extend working lives. A powered exoskeleton “Muscle Suit” for the lower back developed by Japanese company Innophys Co. is designed to help older workers in fields like farming, nursing and manufacturing to lift heavy objects.

Evidence continues to grow that working longer is better for mental, physical and financial health. Postponing retirement until at least age 67 resulted in a one-third reduction in cognitive decline compared with those who retired at ages 61-67, with positive effects lasting until age 74, according to a study published in September in the journal SSM-Population Health. The study used data from the Health and Retirement Study, a longitudinal project of 20,469 people sponsored by the National Institute on Aging.

“We shouldn’t have to feel embarrassed for making a conscious choice to take a path that may be less traditional but may actually, in the long run, allow us to stay in the workplace longer,” Mr. Conley says.

It has been two years since forecasters felt this good about the economic outlook.

In the latest quarterly survey by The Wall Street Journal, business and academic economists lowered the chances of a recession within the next year to 29% from 39% in the January survey . That was the lowest probability since April 2022, when the chances of a recession were set at 28%.

Economists, in fact, don’t think the economy will get even close to a recession. In January, they on average forecast sub-1% growth in each of the first three quarters of this year. Now, they expect growth to bottom out this year at an inflation-adjusted 1.4% in the third quarter.

Just 10% of survey respondents think the economy will experience at least one quarter of negative growth over the next 12 months, down from 33% in January.

The Wall Street Journal survey was conducted from April 5 to 9, just before the release of March consumer-price index data showing inflation running hotter than economists had anticipated.

The U.S. economy has far outperformed expectations over the past year and a half. Instead of stumbling under the weight of the Federal Reserve’s most aggressive interest-rate-raising campaign in four decades, it has continued expanding at a robust clip.

Few think that the economy can do quite as well as last year’s 3.1% growth, as measured by the seasonally adjusted fourth-quarter change from a year earlier. That figure might have been boosted by one-time factors such as federal infrastructure and semiconductor legislation and an uptick in immigration , which also might not last.

Still, economists have had to rethink forecasts for a major slowdown as more time has passed and one still doesn’t seem imminent. Economists on average think the economy grew at a 2.2% rate in the first three months of the year, up from a 0.9% forecast in January.

“The U.S. economy is performing very well,” EconForecaster economist James Smith said in the survey. “We’re truly the envy of the world.”

Much has changed since economists were last this optimistic. Two years ago, the Fed’s benchmark federal-funds rate was set between 0.25% and 0.5%. Inflation was high but economists still generally thought that it could come down without too much help from the Fed. They forecast steady growth and the midpoint of the range for the fed-funds rate topping out at just above 2.5%.

Now, the fed-funds rate is sitting between 5.25% and 5.5%, and economists don’t see a bunch of cuts coming soon. Many analysts trimmed their rate-cut forecasts after last week’s hot inflation report. But even before the report, survey respondents predicted that rates would end the year at 4.67%, implying three cuts. In January, their responses suggested that they thought four or five cuts were likely.

Economists now think the economy can withstand higher rates than they did not long ago.

They expect the 10-year Treasury yield—a key borrowing benchmark that was around 4.4% at the time of the survey—to end 2024 at 3.97%. Looking further into the future, they expect the yield to end 2026 at 3.78%. That is slightly above even their forecast last October, when the yield was higher than it is now.

Many economists have long thought that the economy can handle higher interest rates when it is capable of growing faster, and particularly when worker productivity has increased.

To that end, economists expect the Labor Department’s measure of productivity to rise at an annual rate of 1.9% over the next decade. That matches the annual increase in productivity over the last 40 years. But it is above the 1.2% pace of the 2010s, when the 10-year Treasury yield was typically stuck between 1.5% and 2.5%.

Some economists are now enthusiastic about the economy’s longer-term potential.

“We think that the American economy has entered a virtuous cycle where strong productivity results in growth above the long-term trend, inflation between 2% and 2.5% and an unemployment rate between 3.5% and 4%,” RSM US chief economist Joe Brusuelas said in the survey.

Many aren’t quite as optimistic. One downside of a better growth outlook is that a stronger economy could make it harder for inflation to fall all the way back to the Fed’s 2% target.

An inflation gauge that is closely watched by the Fed, the core personal-consumption expenditures price index, was 2.8% in February, its most recent reading. Economists now expect it to end the year at 2.5%, after having forecast 2.3% in January.

Economists, on average, believe that core PCE inflation will fall to 2.1% by the end of next year without a recession. However, their projections might already have ticked higher after last week’s price data, and some continue to worry that the Fed’s efforts to control inflation still present a major threat to the economy.

“The risks are clearly skewed toward more hawkish Fed outcomes, which could drag on our growth forecasts,” Deutsche Bank economists Brett Ryan and Matthew Luzzetti said in the survey.

The Wall Street Journal survey was answered by 69 economists. Not every economist responded to every question.

The New Post-60 Career Paths

Researchers and workplace experts are figuring out what late-in-life careers could look like.

Economists lift their growth forecasts in latest Wall Street Journal survey