Baby boomers or bust?

The Reinvention of Retirement study involves researchers in Australia as well as McGill and York Universities in Canada.

Paul Evans, a Research Fellow in the Department of Management and Marketing says the research team is particularly keen to find out how organisations, not just individuals, will be affected by changing trends in retirement. “This study will contribute to advancing our knowledge about how baby boomers are imagining and practising retirement and how firms are responding both in Australia and Canada. We want to ask how are managers and professionals of this generation making their way from careers in large organisations into some type of retirement? How will the pathways they create affect the firms they leave behind, and how are firms responding to the waves of baby boomer retirees and potential retirees now hitting them?

“For individuals these questions raise issues about life satisfaction, achieving life goals and retaining dignity as they enter a new stage in life. From an organisation perspective, there are concerns that the baby boomer generation’s retirement will cause serious shortages of expertise and experience in vital sectors of the economy, especially when combined with smaller cohorts of new professionals and managers.”

Associate Professor Leisa Sargent says many OECD nations are already responding to these changes and re-shaping who is responsible for what in retirement. “Many of them are emphasising ‘productive’, ‘active’ and ‘positive’ ageing, in terms of policies relating to the repealing of pensions and user-pays health services and the continued engagement in work to be ‘forever productive’.”

“Our research seeks to examine the variation in retirement meanings and experiences, assessing both the practical and theoretical implications. Will we see this generation of retirees be ‘forever productive’ or will they be more likely to be ‘disengaged and in decline’?”

The preliminary results make for interesting reading: retirees seem generally satisfied with their new-found freedom and independence and many are actively engaged during retirement, be it through a broad range of leisure activities, ‘cherry picking’ interesting work or volunteering. “For these retirees there is a strong forward-looking focus, though this is not a uniform experience,” says Associate Professor Sargent.

And Australia needs to switch its focus of retirement as an individual project to one that is a joint project, says Sargent. “The general experience for most Australian workers is in dual earner families, and this means we need to broaden our understanding of retirement from an ‘individual’ to a ‘joint’ project.

“The research will allow public policy – in relation to retirement savings and active ageing initiatives – to be made with knowledge of its likely impact on this key group, whether the goal is to increase or maintain labour force participation or maximise societal wellbeing.”

The research team is eager to interview individuals aged between 55 and 65, who have spent a significant amount of their career (minimum 10 years within the last 15) in large private sector organisations, who are either recently retired or still working but considering retirement.

For more information please contact
Paul Evans
8344 7083
evansp@unimelb.edu.au
or Associate Professor Leisa Sargent
8344 5576
lsargent@unimelb.edu.au