Studying retirement from a career perspective. Are people who take charge of their career less inclined to retire?

To deal with demographic changes in the labor market and an increasing life expectancy, it is important for older workers to extend their working lives (European Commission 2012). A significant amount of research has been conducted in the past few decades on factors impacting individuals’ transition into retirement. Most of these studies look at personal factors (for example, health or wealth), family factors (for example, spouse working status or care status), job and organizational factors (for example, job characteristics or age stereotypes at the workplace) and institutional factors (for example, early retirement schemes) influencing this transition (see for instance Feldman 1994; Shultz, Morton and Weckerle 1998; Wang and Schulz 2010). They focus on factors pushing or pulling older workers into retirement at a particular moment in time.

Surprisingly, few studies take a career perspective when studying the transition into retirement (De Vos and Segers 2013; Topa, Moriano, Depolo, Alcover and Morales, 2009). However, retirement is an important career transition (De Vos and Segers 2013). Moreover, it is often argued that people with sustainable careers will postpone this career transition and remain longer in the labor market (Newman 2011). Sustainable careers are flexible and adaptable, not only to employers’ needs but also to individuals’ needs (Newman 2011). To build sustainable careers, people need the necessary career competencies to self-navigate their career (Eby, Butts and Lockwood 2003). This enables them to pursue a satisfying career and to benefit from opportunities in the internal and external labor market (Eby et al. 2003). Both this career satisfaction (Hall and Mirvis 1995) and employability (Armstrong-Stassen and Stassen 2013; Gendron 2011) are believed to extend people’s working lives. Many active aging policies’ (OECD 1998; Walker and Maltby 2012) are based on these career related assumptions. These policies aim to increase older workers’ freedom to make personal choices and support their adaptability to deal with changing circumstances in the labor market in order to guarantee their employability (Moulaert and Briggs 2012). Likewise HR age policies supporting a developmental climate for older workers are based on the idea that this may enhance their competencies, increase their employability and consequently extend their working lives (Armstrong-Stassen and Schlosser 2008; Bal, De Jong, Jansen and Bakker 2012; Leisink and Knies, 2011; Thijssen and Rocco 2010).

Even though age policies are inspired by the idea that sustainable careers may extend individuals’ working lives through their impact on career satisfaction and employability, empirical evidence remains scarce. Therefore, in this chapter, we will investigate how career competencies influence the intention to retire through their impact on self-directedness, career satisfaction and employability. We thereby focus on two career competencies for which the current career literature has showed increasing attention (Hall 1996; Hall and Chandler 2005; Verbruggen and Sels 2008). More specifically, Hall (1996, 2004) considered self-awareness and adaptability as career competencies that are crucial for self-directedness. While self-awareness facilitates self-evaluation, adaptability enables individuals to respond to changing demands from the environment and deal with new circumstances. We will examine how both career competencies, self-awareness and adaptability, impact self-directedness and how employability in the internal and external labor market as well as subjective career satisfaction mediate the relationship between self-directedness and the retirement intention of older workers.

Studying employee retirement from a career perspective, this study makes a valuable contribution to the literature. It thereby also adds to the literature by testing the supposition that both employability and career satisfaction are crucial in the context of career transitions, in this case employee retirement. While the underlying idea is widely accepted (Bal et al. 2012; Walker and Maltby 2012), to the best of our knowledge, there is little empirical research investigating this reasoning.