Don’t get too comfortable with the repertoire of financial services you offer your clients.

If you’re going to remain relevant in this dramatically changing IA world I’ve been telling you about in recent columns, you’re going to have to add a new service for your clients.

This addition pertains to retirement planning, but before I explain what it is, think for a moment about the retirement model that dates back to the late 1940s and early 1950s. Back then, workers retired at 62 and received a gold watch, a pension and a Social Security check. The income was small but enough to support a couple through retirement.

That retirement model, a 20th century innovation, is fading fast. Soon it will disappear completely as we advance further into the 21st century.
You know why. Life expectancies are lengthening. Just a few months ago, the Society of Actuaries updated its mortality tables; men 65 and older in good health are now expected to live 86.6 years on average, while women of the same age and health status will live an average of 88.8 years.

And continuing advances in medicine and biotechnology will keep improving morbidity and extending longevity. Living well into one’s 90s and 100s will be commonplace.

Clearly, it won’t be possible for most clients to retire at 65 and live to 110, depending almost entirely on their investments for financial support for 45 years.

Fortunately for these millions of Americans, the future isn’t grim. That’s because, even though many will live to 110 and beyond, they won’t spend nearly so many of those years in retirement.

This is because the American lifeline will change dramatically, thanks to exponential technology.

Previous generations experienced a linear lifeline—they were born, went to school, got a job, retired and then died. This was a sequential process, with each segment completed before the next occurred.

But that’s not how our lives will be in the future. Instead, our lifelines will be cyclical rather than linear. Many are already living this way.

Those leading cyclical lives will not experience the life of school-work-retirement-death. Instead, the norm will be school, work, then back to school, followed by entrance into a completely new career. This will be followed by a short retirement, more accurately a sabbatical, that will be temporary rather than permanent. Upon completion, clients will go back to school and then back to a new job.

Even today, the average worker has eight jobs by age 35, according to the Department of Labor. This trend will continue for everyone. Clients will go back and forth through school, work, education and leisure, often doing several things simultaneously rather than sequentially. College degrees will be replaced by lifelong learning. This is already happening: At George Washington University, for example, nearly a thousand full-time students are over age 50.

Cycling within and through life segments means schoolteachers will take time off and never return to the classroom. Pilots won’t resume flying, and accountants will leave paperwork behind. Early retirees (who used to be called beach bums and ski bums) might take classes to learn about subjects that have always interested them—and then turn those interests into income-generating careers or businesses. Social, charitable and civic activities will pepper one’s resume, as will frequent participation in classes online, at community colleges and universities. Many people will have multiple employers simultaneously, working part-time for each in ways that produce full-time incomes.

Most aren’t consciously or deliberately seeking this change. For many, there is no choice: Their careers are becoming obsolete due to the disruptive nature of exponential technology. Advances in artificial intelligence and robotics mean workers in half of today’s occupations will be displaced by automation in the next decade or two, according to a study at the University of Oxford.

So whether by desire or necessity, we can expect lots more of our clients to switch careers in their 50s and beyond. They will find that the old linear lifeline won’t work for them. Many will take (or need) an extended break between careers, likely requiring use of part of their savings. Further education will require additional use of savings, but working well into their 70s and 80s—made possible by massive advances in medicine and health care that will slow and even reverse the aging process (so that people in their 90s will feel like they are in their 60s)—will reduce the pressure to amass by 65 all the money they’ll need to support themselves for their life expectancy.

The result: Spending fewer years fully retired, with no earned income, and allowing much of their savings to grow for 50 or 60 years instead of just 30 or 40—means it’s unlikely they’ll outlive their money, even if they do live to age 110 or longer.

So how will all of this affect the way you’ll serve your clients in the future? That was the point I made at the start of this article.

The cyclical lifeline means we are facing a paradigm shift in retirement and thus in retirement planning. And as financial advisors, we will have to incorporate this new paradigm into our repertoire of services.

Here’s what I mean. We’ve all become used to telling our 50-something clients that they need to keep doing what they’re doing for another 15 years or so. If they keep working and keep saving, staying invested in the portfolios we carefully manage for them, they’ll reach age 65 or so in fine condition to retire.

The problem is: Their career might not last 15 years because of exponential technologies. They might need to return to school to learn new skills so they can continue to earn an income. And they’ll need help anticipating this, determining what education they need, where to get it and what career to pursue upon attainment of their new skills.

In other words, we have a new planning function to perform. In addition to college planning, retirement planning and estate planning, we will add career planning. We’ll actually help our clients recognize that their current careers are in jeopardy, help them choose new careers based on their aptitudes, interests and personalities, work with them to determine where they can get the training they’ll need and calculate how to pay for that education.

If this reminds you of high school guidance counselors, you’re not far off. Essentially, that’s what we’ll become—not for teens choosing colleges and majors, but for our adult clients who are approaching midlife crossroads.

Of course, we’ll still give advice in all the traditional areas of financial planning—saving for college for children, buying houses, handling insurance needs, credit and debt management, to name a few—but retirement planning will morph into helping our clients thrive in their new cyclic lifelines.

To fill this critical role, we too will need further education and training. Like our clients, we need to go back to school to learn how to help them in the area of career planning during exponential times. Or you could join a larger firm that has the resources to help you deliver these important new services to your clients.

Either way, get ready for the new phase of the financial planning profession. It’ll be here sooner than you think.

Ric Edelman is the chairman and CEO of Edelman Financial Services LLC, a registered investment advisor. He is an investment advisor representative who offers advisory services through EFS and a registered principal of (offering securities through) Sanders Morris Harris Inc., an affiliated broker-dealer. You can connect with him on LinkedIn or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/RicEdelman. Follow him on Twitter at @RicEdelman.