How to Move Beyond the DIY Transition to Encore Careers

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In Portland, Mark Noonan faced a different kind of transition, one born in tragedy. At 52, after his wife died in an accident, Noonan decided to leave an unsatisfying management job and look for something more fulfilling.

He headed back to school at Portland Community College in Oregon. Through a one-year program, he earned an associate's degree in gerontology and launched a second career with Elders in Action, helping Portland tackle both the challenges and opportunities presented by an aging society.

Cassinelli's and Noonan's paths approximate a kind of "gap year" for adults—the chance to catch their breath, test the waters, and fashion a new chapter of life and work.

We'll have to invent new ways to finance this transition. Even with more ways to try on and train for new roles, underwriting this shift is a formidable barrier. One solution: Instead of telling boomers to save for an unsustainable 30-year retirement, the financial-services industry would do well to develop and market new products aimed at the midlife transition.

How about IPAs—Individual Purpose Accounts—to go along with the retirement-focused IRAs? IPAs could be set up to provide tax breaks for savings focused on education, training, or fellowships after the age of 50. Vehicles of this sort could help individuals invest in their own future by covering the costs of midlife transitions.

Finally, innovations in public policy will be essential, not only in creating tax incentives for savings mechanisms like IPAs, but for fashioning a midlife transition superhighway to replace the rickety routes that currently exist.

Here we won't have to start from scratch. The new Serve America Act establishes the prospect of federally funded encore fellowships in all 50 states. That's a start. But given the size of the boomer generation, we require nothing less than a national human resources strategy and policy agenda for the second half of life, one that includes health coverage for the midlife shift.

If we replace the DIY transition with a sturdy passage that helps boomers find new meaning, continued income, and the chance to use all they have invested in their human capital, we can make a virtue out of longer working lives over the next 50 years just as we made a virtue out of shorter ones in the past 50.

In the process, we can turn the demographic wave already washing over us into a new tide of individual and social renewal.

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