%0 Report %D 2016 %T Occupational Transitions at Older Ages: What Moves are People Making? %A Amanda Sonnega %A McFall, Brooke Helppie %A Robert J. Willis %K Employment and Labor Force %K Older Adults %K Transitions %X Given the clear benefit for both public and private finances of extending work lives, many policymakers are interested in finding and promoting ways to accomplish this objective while balancing concerns for work ability at older ages. At the same time, retirement itself is transforming from a simple transition from full-time work to full and permanent retirement to more of a process, potentially occurring in several stages over a number of years. We consider a set of work transitions at ages when the largest numbers of people are retiring and potentially pursuing different paths to full and permanent retirement. Among workers who transition between occupations, the most common transitions are between those that are closely related. However, even within closely related occupations, there are no large pipelines between any two. By age 62, 57 percent of workers are no longer in the labor force, 26 percent are still in their “career” occupation, and 17 percent have changed from their career occupation to another occupation. Beginning at age 66, however, the percentages in different occupations, which may be bridge employment or unretirement, are very similar to the percentages remaining in career occupations. Occupational changes later in life tend to be accompanied by decreases in hourly earnings, suggesting that if workers are seeking flexible or part-time bridge employment, it may come at a cost. %B Working Paper Series %I Michigan Retirement Research Center, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan %C Ann Arbor, Michigan %8 09/2016 %G eng %U http://www.mrrc.isr.umich.edu/publications/papers/pdf/wp352.pdf %0 Report %D 2015 %T Occupations and Work Characteristics: Effects on Retirement Expectations and Timing %A McFall, Brooke Helppie %A Amanda Sonnega %A Robert J. Willis %A Péter Hudomiet %K Employment and Labor Force %K Retirement Planning and Satisfaction %X Population aging and attendant pressures on public budgets have spurred considerable interest in understanding factors that influence retirement timing. A range of sociodemographic and economic characteristics have been shown to predict both earlier and later retirement. Less is known about the role of occupations and their characteristics on the work choices of older workers. Knowing more about the occupations that workers seem to stay in longer or leave earlier may point the way to policy interventions that are beneficial to both individuals and system finances. This project uses detailed occupational categories and work characteristics in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) linked to information in the Occupational Information Network (O NET) to examine compositional changes in occupations held by older workers over time; to provide some basic and interesting information about relationships between occupations and their characteristics and retirement expectations and outcomes; and to shed some light on which occupations and associated characteristics might encourage or discourage longer working lives. There are large percentage changes (increases in decreases) in the percentage of older workers in occupations over time. Considering detailed as opposed to aggregated occupational categories yields interesting additional information. Jobs that HRS respondents say entail less physical effort, less stress, and jobs that have not increased in difficulty in recent decades, and those in which people can reduce hours if desired, are associated with longer work. While the traditional blue collar-retire earlier and white collar-work longer associations emerge, we find interesting exceptions that suggest fruitful directions for future research. %I Ann Arbor, MI, Michigan Retirement Research Center %G eng %4 O NET/Retirement %$ 999999