TrendWatcher

Yesterday I read a good article in the Harvard Business Review called “It’s Time to Retire Retirement” by Ken Dychtwald, Tamara Erickson, and Bob Morison. It mainly focused on things that HR could and should do to wade through the up coming labor shortage that will occur when the Baby Boomers start retiring.

HR changing is a good start, but it is going to take a cultural shift to get people to rethink retirement. HR can make all the changes it wants, but if someone feels that they have the RIGHT to stop working at 65 and yet they are still working at 70, HR is going to have to deal with some bitterness.

I don’t think that the professional world is going to have much of a problem retiring retirement, but the middle to lower middle class, wage earning Americans are going to get pretty uppity about it.

It is safe to say that the Government isn’t going to do a whole lot to help us here. Corporate America wields a ton of power and they may be able to accomplish some change, but it will be slow. As a nation, we need to identify and create some cultural trends that will begin to affect the way people view working after the age of 60.

There is already a trend of ‘people not having enough money to retire’, but we need some positive reasons to keep working.

Take a minute or two to brainstorm and come up with a trend that could be helpful to increasing Americans’ desire to keep working and post it in the comments.