Chapter 8

The Middle and Late Career Stages:Career Challenges for Seasoned

Employees

Key Points in this Chapter

The Middle Career Years Remaining Productive: Growth, Maintenance, or Stagnation? Organizational Actions During Midcareer Individual Actions During Midcareer The Late Career Organizational Actions During Late Career

The Middle and LateCareer Stages

The midcareer years roughly span the 15 year period between the ages of 40 and 55.

The late career years stage includes those who are over the age of 55.

Recent events have blurred the distinctions between the middle and late career stages.

The aging of the baby boom generation, the roughly 78 million people born in the United States during the nearly 20 year period after WWII, will have a dramatic effect on work organizations, government institutions, and individual career management over the next decades.

The Middle and LateCareer Stages

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics presents a vivid picture of the future labor force: By the year 2010, baby boomers will be aged 46 to 64,

and will comprise 37% of the civilian labor force. By 2020, BLS projections have the baby boom workers

representing 20% of the labor force, a decrease of 30 million workers during 2000 to 2020.

By 2030, baby boomers will represent less than 6% of the work force and will number less than 10 million.

The Middle Career Years

The midcareer years pose two major career/life tasks: Confronting the midlife transition Remaining productive

The Middle Career Years Confronting the Midlife Transition Levinson suggests that the midlife transition takes place

between the ages of 40 and 45. It can be triggered by a number of experiences. The individual at midlife is increasingly forced to reappraise

and recognize that he or she has stopped growing up, and has begun growing old.

Issues include technical or managerial obsolescence, career plateauing, and personal failure.

People do appear to need to reappraise their lives as they enter middle adulthood.

It is unclear whether the feelings that accompany midlife appraisal are so intense as to constitute a crisis.

Remaining Productive: Growth, Maintenance, or Stagnation?

Middle career years have also been called middlescence because it can be as frustrating and confusing as adolescence.

The Career Plateau A career plateau has traditionally been defined as the “point in

a career where the likelihood of additional hierarchical promotion is very low”.

Types include being structurally plateaued and content plateaued.

Organizations may plateau employees for organizational constraint or assessment reasons.

Seasoned employees may choose to be plateaued for personal choice reasons.

Plateauing may be a universal experience. There are several negative outcomes associated with being

plateaued, although there are also potential positives. Managerial employees may be solid citizens, stars, deadwood,

or learners.

Remaining Productive: Growth, Maintenance, or Stagnation?

Obsolescence Obsolescence has been defined as the degree to which

“workers lack the up-to-date knowledge or skills necessary to maintain effective performance in either their current or future work roles.”

Obsolescence has its root in change. Both the individual and the work environment play a critical

role in averting obsolescence.

Remaining Productive: Growth, Maintenance, or Stagnation?

Career Change Although many people in midcareer do shift career

direction, career change is neither an inevitable product of the midlife transition nor is it limited to the midcareer years.

Career change has been viewed as movement into a different occupation that is not part of a typical career path or is not part of a path that represents increasing financial gains.

Organizational Actions During Midcareer

Help Employees Understand Midcareer Experiences Provide Expanded and Flexible Mobility Opportunities

Career mobility is a broad term that denotes all possible directional movements within one’s organization.

Utilization of the Current Job Encourage and Teach Mentoring Skills Training and Continuing Education Broaden the Reward System

Individual Actions During Midcareer

Dealing With Job Loss Loss of one’s job can be a traumatic experience at any

point in the life cycle, but it may be especially difficult and damaging for persons in the midlife phase. Individuals may be vulnerable to periods of self-doubts

and a questioning of competence and worth. Individuals may be more susceptible to financial strains. Job loss can put strain on marriages.

Individual Actions During Midcareer

Dealing With Job Loss Stages of Loss

An initial response to the loss of a job types of responses include shock, anger, relief,

escapism Confront the tasks of becoming reemployed Vacillation about one’s career, self doubt, and anger Dismay, resignation about staying unemployed, and

withdrawal.

The Late Career

Remaining Productive Remaining competent and productive is important to the

late career employee. Society’s stereotypes and biases against older people and

older workers are prevalent. Despite the inaccuracy of age stereotypes, such biases can

have a significant effect on how organizations treat and manage their older workers.

These management assumptions can produce a self-fulfilling prophecy in which older workers, deprived of developmental experiences and mobility opportunities, never have the chance to disconfirm the original stereotypes.

Older workers can be dedicated, productive, and enthusiastic employees, but must be treated with dignity and respect and must be recognized for their value to the organization.

The Late Career

Preparation for Retirement Retirement is a major career transition for most people because it

can signify an end to 40, 50, or even 60 years of continual employment.

Retirement is defined as the departure from a job or career path taken by individuals after middle age, where the individual displays a limited or nonexistent psychological commitment to work thereafter.

Preparing for retirement involves deciding when to retire and planning for a satisfying, fulfilling life upon retirement.

Attitudes toward retirement are likely to be rooted in one’s attitude toward work.

For some, leaving the work role may be like leaving one’s self concept behind.

Satisfaction in retirement has been linked with a variety of factors. Retirement intentions can take different forms given the variety of

situations in which older workers might find themselves.

The Late Career

Early Retirement Is generally viewed as the decision to retire prior to the

age at which one is eligible for full corporate pensions, typically when one is in his or her mid-40s to late 50s in age.

Phased Retirement Normally means that an older worker remains with his or

her employer while generally reducing hours worked, with the reduced work time viewed as a step towards full retirement.

Bridge Employment Bridge employment allows workers who have retired

from a career-oriented job to move to a transitional work position which thus allows a bridge between one’s long term career and the entry into total retirement from all work.

Organizational Actions During Late Career

Performance Standards and Feedback Education and Job Restructuring Development and Enforcement of Nondiscrimination

Policies Development of Retirement Planning Programs Establishment of Flexible Work Patterns Hiring Seasoned Employees Individual Actions During Late Career