Encore Careers: How to Find Meaningful Work After Retirement

Bill Cohan spent seventeen years as an investment banker on Wall Street. He was successful, respected, and well-compensated. He was also deeply unfulfilled. His true calling was investigative journalism — a passion he'd prepared for with degrees from Duke and Columbia.

When the economy shifted after 9/11 and he was let go, Bill didn't see it as a tragedy. He saw it as a liberation. He went back to journalism and wrote "The Last Tycoons," which became a New York Times bestseller.

"There was only one good day a year on Wall Street — bonus day," Bill says. "Now as a writer, every day is a good day."

Bill's story is what an encore career looks like: taking a lifetime of experience and finally directing it toward the work you were always meant to do.

What Is an Encore Career?

An encore career isn't just a second job or a way to fill time in retirement. It's a purposeful pivot — a chance to combine your accumulated skills, wisdom, and experience with the passions and strengths that may have been sidelined during your primary career.

For many people, retirement creates a vacuum. After decades of identity being tied to a profession, the sudden absence of structure, role, and daily purpose can be disorienting. Research on post-retirement adjustment consistently shows that finding a new sense of purpose is critical to well-being in this transition.

But retirement also creates unprecedented freedom. For perhaps the first time in your adult life, you can ask: "What do I really want to do?" — and actually pursue the answer.

The Research Behind Encore Purpose

In our PhD study with adults 50 and older, we found that our purpose-fostering intervention produced statistically significant increases in:

• **Sense of purpose** (the primary measure)
• **Happiness and life satisfaction**
• **Positive emotion and grit**
• **Sense of achievement**

These gains persisted at least three months after the program — and were strongest for those who started with the least sense of purpose. If you're feeling directionless in retirement, that's not a sign that you're too far gone. It's a sign that this process can have a profound impact on you.

Finding Your Encore Direction

The framework we use for encore career discovery follows the same evidence-based principles that underpin all our work, adapted for the unique position of someone with decades of life experience:

1. Mine your life for patterns. You have 30, 40, or 50+ years of data about what energizes you. Look back across your entire life — not just your career, but your hobbies, volunteer work, relationships, and even childhood interests. What aspects consistently appear? Creativity? Teaching? Solving complex problems? Connecting people?

2. Identify what you wished you had done. Many people over 50 carry a "road not taken." Maybe you always wanted to write, or teach, or build something, or advocate for a cause. That persistent pull is a clue. It's been pointing toward your purpose all along.

3. Match your shape to a real need. Purpose, as we define it, involves a "beyond the self" component — using your unique talents to positively impact others. What does the world need that you are uniquely equipped to provide? With your experience and wisdom, the answer might surprise you.

4. Start small, but start. You don't need to launch a nonprofit on day one. Volunteer. Consult. Mentor. Take a class. Write a blog. The goal is to begin expressing your purpose in the world and see how it feels.

Encore Careers in Action

Encore careers take many forms:

• A retired engineer who becomes a STEM mentor in underserved schools
• A former corporate executive who launches a coaching practice
• A retired nurse who advocates for healthcare policy
• A lifelong hobbyist who turns their passion into a small business
• A grandparent who writes the family history they always wanted to preserve

What these all share is alignment — the person's daily work matches who they truly are, often for the first time in their lives.

Purpose as Health Insurance

Remember: research shows that purpose in adults over 50 is associated with reduced mortality risk, protection against cognitive decline, better cardiovascular health, reduced depression, and improved sleep. An encore career isn't just about fulfillment — it's one of the best things you can do for your health.

As the researchers Cohen, Bavishi, and Rozanski concluded in their meta-analysis: future research should focus on finding interventions that foster purpose in older adults. That's exactly what our PhD research did — and the results confirmed that purpose can be intentionally increased at any age.

Begin Your Encore

Our AI-powered purpose assessment was developed and tested specifically with adults 50+ in a rigorous randomized controlled trial. It's not a career placement tool — it's a guided self-discovery journey that helps you understand your unique combination of passions, strengths, and the contribution only you can make.

Whether you're approaching retirement, newly retired, or years into it and still searching — your encore is waiting. The wisdom you've gathered over a lifetime isn't just your past. It's the foundation of your most purposeful chapter yet.