Second-Career Pattern

This entry describes second careers across the life span, which may take the form of employment in an entirely new type of work or an entirely new industry, or simply switching jobs but continuing to work for the same employer. Declining job security, increasing life expectancy, automation, and new technologies mean many people are suddenly looking for second, third, or even fourth careers. This second-career pattern can happen in early adulthood, midlife, or in the traditional retirement years and may involve a number of unrelated or related shifts in jobs, employers, and industries. For example, the workforce is aging, and growing numbers of older workers are retiring from their career jobs both earlier and later than the typical retirement age of 65. Given increasing life expectancy, many older workers are seeking second careers as they approach or move through their 60s or 70s.

The second-career pattern is a striking departure from the traditional orderly career in postindustrial countries. However, multiple, often unrelated, jobs across the life span is commonplace in developing countries, given the absence of the social protections associated with single-career paths characteristics of North America and Europe in the last half of the 20th century. Now, second careers are increasing in these countries as well.

Workers of all ages and life stages may pursue new careers because they are dissatisfied with their current jobs. Women have traditionally left the workforce or scaled back on their careers while raising young children, often taking on a second career when their children are school age, finding their old occupations are no longer available to them once they have moved off track. Young adults may be unable to find long-term employment and thus move from job to job. Other individuals across the life span may be forced into second careers as their jobs disappear overseas or are replaced by automation. New information, computational, and communication technologies are automating jobs and, together with a competitive global workforce, are disrupting the traditional mechanisms defining the timing and duration of what was often a single work career. These transformations are also disrupting the lives and identities of those defined by their jobs but unexpectedly laid off. For example, most industrial work is now accomplished by robots. Many bank tellers have been supplanted by ATMs. Computers are now doing the work previously accomplished by many travel and airline agents. And self-driving vehicles are slated to replace taxi and bus drivers as well as those driving long-distance trucks.

Some dissatisfied or displaced workers at all stages of the life span are becoming entrepreneurs, trying out a second career in self-employment. For older workers, a second-career pattern may take the form of part-time or less demanding bridge jobs to make the transition into retirement more gradual or an encore career in the public or nonprofit sector as a way to give back. Significant numbers of people retiring from their (first) career jobs are moving into public service, paid or unpaid, seeking ways to promote the greater good.