For clients who plan on working well into their 70s or beyond—whether to keep their minds sharp or to make up for having fewer retirement assets than they would like—matching their skills with employers who need those skills will be critical to their plan’s success.
But will they realistically a) find those jobs and b) be able to compete for them?
To answer the question of the likelihood of employment in 2030 for the soon-to-retire workforce of today, the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College (CRR) took a hard look at the trends and came to a happy conclusion: Declines in the job categories popular with current older workers will be more than offset by increasing opportunities in job categories that might even be a better fit for the aging population of tomorrow.
Overall, the study said, the five best categories for the older worker over the next 10 years when considering both job growth and suitability are legal occupations, entertainment, managers, business and financial operations specialists, and other white collar jobs.
The five worst categories are maintenance, extraction/mining, construction and installation, manufacturing, and farming, fishing and forestry.
“People used to retire and claim their Social Security in lockstep. But the rise in the full retirement age has done more to break that link than anything else,” said Gal Wettstein, one of the authors of “Will the Jobs of the Future Support An Older Workforce?”
“I think it’s still true that most people retire in their 60s,” he continued. “But for those who don’t, they do have skills that don’t decline with age and that will be useful in the future labor market.”
In the study, the CRR research team looked at 26 categories of jobs currently held by older workers. It then assessed which of those categories will have growth and which will decline. And finally, it considered the factors that go into aging (accumulated knowledge and vital experience on the one hand, decline in short-term memory and physicality on the other) to come up with a Suitability Index that summarizes which occupations will be the best matches for older workers.
“By analyzing the future demand alongside the potential future supply of older workers’ labor, the analysis can go beyond merely looking at the jobs older workers do today to explore what they could do in 2030,” the study stated.
The study concluded that while it’s true that the jobs that older workers have today are expected to shrink, the jobs that older workers would be very capable of performing in 10 years are increasing, and those jobs may actually be better suited to their abilities.
“Furthermore, it is important to remember that the older workers of 2030 are, in large part, the prime-age workers of today,” the study said. “The occupations of workers in their 40s and early 50s today may have a more robust outlook and these workers, also, may adjust their occupations as demand for different tasks shift in the coming years.”
And still other areas of employment might tap the same skills today’s workers have, but for a different kind of employer. For example, office and administrative support are very much on the decline, but postsecondary education support jobs will be increasing by more than the loss in general office support. Since the skills in both categories are very similar, that’s potential net job gains for the older worker.
“The occupation projected to have the greatest growth is healthcare support (including jobs like home health aides, nursing assistants, and medical assistants). This occupation is well below average in terms of suitability for older workers (1.2 standard deviations worse than average, based on the standardized Suitability Index),” the study found. “However, the occupation projected to have the second-fastest growth is “other white collar” (such as miscellaneous managers, market research analysts, and computer programmers). This group of occupations is 1.3 standard deviations better than average for older workers.”