Seniors Housing & Healthcare Trends

LOS ANGELES: A growing number of Australians are embracing semi-retirement, demographers and advisers say. Among them is Sheena Wilson, 67, who called it quits on her role as global head of talent strategy at BNY Mellon in 2014. It was the end of her time on the ‘‘single-company career ladder’’ but the start of what she calls her ‘‘portfolio career’’.

Today, Ms Wilson balances responsibilities as a leadership and career consultant, non-executive director and founding director of Parents on Leave, which helps mums and dads returning to work after having a baby. When her granddaughters were younger, she also made sure she had at least a day carved out a week to spend with them.

It is a portfolio of roles that, taken together, mean that some weeks she feels even busier than she did while traditionally employed – in a good way.

‘‘Work still consumes about 75 per cent of my weekly time, sometimes 100 per cent and sometimes less, but that’s exactly how I’ve chosen to manage my work-life in this stage of my career,’’ she says.

Another semi-retiree is Tom Morrison, a former inspector at Fire and Rescue NSW, although that’s not a title he likes to use. He is 18 months into his long-service leave, and will then exit the Fire Service after a 40-year career.

Mr Morrison, 60, views this period of his life not as a transition into a new phase as a writer; it is his encore career.

‘‘You very much need something other than work to sustain you [when you retire],’’ said Mr Morrison, who is currently working on a fantasy epic.

‘‘I see so many firefighters who have been firemen their whole lives and everything was ‘fire brigade’. When they retired, they almost fell off the perch within a couple of years because they were sort of empty.’’

Over the past three decades there has been a marked shift in how people retire, according to KPMG director of demographics Terry Rawnsley.

Hitting 65 is no more about working five days a week and then saying ‘‘see you later’’, he said. It was about slipping down to four, then three and then maybe two days a week.

The lockdowns also highlighted to many workers in professional jobs that they could work part-time from home or even from the beach.

‘‘A lot of it does look to be not about the financial imperative, but about, ‘I enjoy my work, I love to engage with people on a regular basis’,’’ Mr Rawnsley said.

Financial adviser and principal at Plan For Your Future Helen Nan said most of her clients now went through a period of semi-retirement before completely leaving work behind.

While finances might play a part in it, it was more often due to a desire to keep busy and fill their time with activities they deemed important.

This was a good thing, as she had also seen people leave work, grow bored and return.

‘‘They had too much time on their hands, and literally not have enough things to do,’’ she said.

Analysis by Joanne Earl, a professor of psychology at Macquarie University, found that in 2018-19, 196,000 people who had retired were back looking for work either because they needed the money or because they were bored.

Ms Wilson, who regularly advises people, particularly women, on navigating the later stages of their careers, said it was critical workers did regular audits of their skills and desires, to ensure they were awake to possibilities inside and outside of paid work, and avoid retirement regret.