By Kate Ashford, Forbes Contributor – 02/28/2017
As people work and live longer in better health, some experts are suggesting that retirement—a traditional retirement, in which you stop working entirely—may become a thing of the past.
“With a 100-year life becoming the reality for many, the idea of retiring at 65 with 40-plus years of retirement to fund no longer seems practical,” says Morag Barrett, CEO of leadership development firm Skyeteam and co-author of the forthcoming book, The Future-Proof Workplace. “Can you imagine the size of the retirement fund we would need to save up to cover this?”
Instead, Barrett and her co-author, business consultant Linda Sharkey, Ph.D., posit that retirement will instead become a series of sabbaticals. “Forget work-life balance,” Barrett says. “The future is that it is all life, with work as a part of it.”
After many conversations with Millennials for their book, Barrett and Sharkey believe the future will involve periods of work that fund a sabbatical, followed by a return to work to refill the coffers for the next sabbatical. “There will likely still be a period of retirement at the end of that journey, but it won’t be the same as we have experienced to date,” Barrett says.
