EDITOR'S note:

AT one time, many people in the Western world anticipated retiring in their 50s or 60s. Now, they are embarking on new careers at the very time that they might have previously been expected to begin a life of leisure.

Increased longevity and a drive to keep contributing to society have led to what are often referred to as "encore careers" - new endeavors that are often different from a person's past experience.

Marci Alboher is the author of "The Encore Career Handbook: How to Make a Living and a Difference in the Second Half of Life." She is also vice president of Encore.org, a nonprofit that helps millions of people pursue second acts for the greater good.

Alboher spoke to Stewart Friedman, Wharton practice professor of management, about second - and even third - acts.

Excerpts from that conversation:

Q: What is an encore career?

A: An encore career is a second or third act that combines personal meaning with social impact and continued income. If you've made enough money to take care of yourself for the rest of your life, your encore career may not be a paid work. But for the majority, it is.

Encore.org is a national nonprofit. It is trying to pave the way for the growing number of people who want to have encore careers. We do that through a variety of programs. The most famous one is the Purpose Prize. We give out US$100,000 prizes to social entrepreneurs over the age of 60. The idea is to change what you think about innovating and aging by elevating these role models.

Q: Why is there so much interest in encore careers now?

A: Demography is a big part of it. We've heard about the gray tsunami - the aging wave of baby boomers coming down the pipe. Ten thousand baby boomers are turning 65 every day, and it's going to be like that for the next 20 years or so. By 2050, we're going to have more people over 65 than under 30. This is a very big demographic shift.

At the same time, we have a longevity shift. It's not so much that we're living longer; we are living longer technically by a few years. But the period of life that's extended - 50s to 70s - are years of vitality and engagement that used to be years that weren't that useful to people.

This work was pioneered by Marc Freedman (founder and CEO of Encore.org). His idea to look at this aging population as a resource rather than a problem, as a legion of problem solvers.

Q: Is this only moving from the private sector to the nonprofit sector?

A: No, it's not just sector switchers. There is something that happens to you. After you've been doing any kind of work for 20 or 30 years, you get this need to shake it up a little. Many people figure out how to shake it up within the confines of what they do.

Maybe you've been in a classroom - a public school teacher - for 30 years. You are ready to get off your feet. But you are not done with education. That's where we see people who go into education policy reform.

Q: How did you get into this?

A: I'm a little pre-encore; I'm slightly younger than the people we look at. But I'm always thinking about the future, so I've got self-interest here.

I had a few career reinventions myself. In my first career, I was a corporate lawyer. After about nine years, I realized it was a bad fit with my organization and our values were clashing. I felt I was representing companies that I didn't believe in and practices that I couldn't support.

I quit to become a writer. I got a piece in The New York Times and said, "Wow, I've had more professional satisfaction out of this one article than anything I've done in the nine years previously." I spent a couple of years trying to turn that into a sustainable career. It took a long time, and it wasn't easy.

Q: What do you tell people who say they'd like to do something new, but they're not sure they can retool?

A: There's this Zen concept of "beginner's mind." You learn something new with the eyes of a beginner, and it's actually a pretty exciting thing.

I think we all have the capacity to continue learning. If you become a life-long learner, you will keep that skill from atrophying. It's a pretty important part of aging: to learn how to learn new things and to exercise that muscle often.

I was at my 25th reunion and our class was dealing with this. We all see 50 ahead of us. We're thinking, "There's 25 years of more work I can do. I could have a career that is as long as what I've been doing for the past 20 or 30 years."

Q: Going back to school?

A: I found people all over my class who were going back to school, who were embarking on master's programs, who were going back for a certificate somewhere, for an online program.

I met a woman who had stayed home for 20 years raising her kids, who got interested in what we're seeing climate-wise. She's back in school to learn about coastal erosion, so she can work in urban planning to help prevent some of the disasters that we're going to be facing in the coming years. It is a field she never even knew existed 25 years ago.

Q: What role do universities play?

A: Universities are going to be a huge part of this. We've worked with community colleges up through Wharton and Harvard Business School. Higher education is the key to helping people through this because people are going to go to places in their community, they're going to go to their alma mater and they're going to go to the name brand in the field. It's a great market opportunity for higher education.

Q: What about age discrimination?

A: Age discrimination does exist.

We have these stereotypes - "The young are more tech savvy" - that we parrot because we think this is the way the world works.

Education is interesting because we have respect for age and experience and wisdom which doesn't exist in some other fields. Education is a hot encore field. Another hot encore field that values age and experience is healthcare.

Yes, ageism exists. The best way to combat it is to find sectors where age is appreciated, wisdom is welcome and experience is valued. But we have also to dispel the stereotypes. I was reading something by Wharton management professor Peter Cappelli in Knowledge@Wharton about combating myths.

There's a myth that you hire an older worker and he won't stay. The data shows that older workers dig in; they're used to finding a job and staying there and being committed. There's another myth that they're more expensive because of healthcare. But many older workers don't have kids on their healthcare plans. They can be less expensive.

Adapted from Knowledge@Wharton, http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu. To read the original, please visit: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=3268