Encore careers

Some people leave a career and want nothing more to do with schedules and meetings. Others discover, sometimes within months of adjusting to retirement, that they miss having somewhere to be and something that matters to work on. An encore career sits in the space between full-speed employment and a full stop: paid work, usually begun in your 50s or 60s, chosen mainly for its social impact rather than its paycheck. Classrooms, clinics, and nonprofits are the classic destinations.

The idea has a specific author. Social entrepreneur Marc Freedman popularized the phrase "encore career" to describe second acts for the greater good, and built a nonprofit, Encore.org, to promote them. In October 2022 the organization renamed itself CoGenerate and shifted its focus toward getting older and younger people working together on shared problems, but by then the word "encore" had entered the retirement vocabulary for good ¹.

An encore career is not the same thing as working in retirement generally, which is often about income first. It is closer to paid volunteering with a W-2. That distinction matters for planning, because encore work almost always pays less than the job you left, and the transition takes longer than most people expect. The sections below cover the common paths, the money, and how to spot employers that actually hire people over 50.

Common paths at a glance#

Sources for this section: [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Teaching#

Every state has some alternative route into teaching for people who hold a bachelor's degree in a subject other than education ⁹. The details vary, but the common shape is this: you pass a subject-matter test, enroll in a preparation program, and teach under a provisional license while you finish the coursework ². Career changers are exactly who these routes were designed for, and a work history in engineering, journalism, or accounting maps more directly onto math, English, and business classrooms than most people assume.

Substitute teaching is the low-commitment way to find out whether you actually like being in a school. Requirements vary by state, from a high school diploma plus a background check to a bachelor's degree and a short permit course. You accept assignments day by day, which makes the work easy to pair with travel or caregiving, and it is one of the rare jobs where telling the scheduler "not this month" carries no penalty.

Sources for this section: [2] [9]

Health care support roles#

You do not need a nursing degree to do useful work in health care. Community health workers connect people to services, run outreach and screening programs, and coach patients through managing conditions such as diabetes. Employers often value lived experience in the community as much as formal credentials, and training is commonly a short certificate or done on the job. The Bureau of Labor Statistics put the median wage at $51,030 a year in May 2024 and projects employment to grow 11 percent from 2024 to 2034, much faster than the average occupation ³.

Patient advocates help people untangle medical bills, insurance denials, and treatment decisions. Many come out of nursing, social work, or the insurance industry, and some earn the Board Certified Patient Advocate credential to signal competence ¹⁰. The field is small and often part time or self-employed, which suits people who want a few clients rather than a full caseload.

Sources for this section: [3] [10]

Nonprofit work and the pay cut#

Nonprofits hire for the same functions companies do: finance, communications, operations, fundraising, program management. The mission is the draw; the pay is the tradeoff. Bureau of Labor Statistics research finds that while nonprofit workers as a group earn slightly more per hour than private-sector workers overall (a quirk of the sector's white-collar job mix), managers and professionals in comparable roles generally earn less at nonprofits than they would at for-profit employers ⁴. Fundraising is its own adjustment: many senior nonprofit roles depend on it, and people who have never asked strangers for money tend to underestimate how much of the job it becomes.

Encore Fellowships were built to bridge exactly this gap. Since 2009 the program has matched experienced professionals with nonprofits for assignments of roughly 1,000 hours over six to twelve months, with a stipend of about $25,000 paid by the host organization. More than 2,300 fellows had been placed by 2024, when the program moved from CoGenerate to the Fedcap Group, which continues to operate it as the Encore Fellowships Network ⁵. The stipend is not a salary, but fellows often convert the assignment into a staff role or use it to build a nonprofit resume quickly.

Sources for this section: [4] [5]

Retraining without a four-year detour#

Community colleges are the workhorse here. Certificate programs in fields like bookkeeping, medical coding, and classroom support run a semester to a year at commuter prices, and lifelong learning covers the tuition waivers and senior auditing policies that can cut the cost further.

Two federal programs are easy to overlook. American Job Centers, funded under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA), offer free help with resumes, job searches, and career counseling, and can fund training for eligible adults and dislocated workers; older workers are among the groups the law directs the system to serve ⁷. The Senior Community Service Employment Program (SCSEP) is more targeted. It places unemployed people 55 and older whose family income is no more than 125 percent of the federal poverty level into paid part-time training assignments, around 20 hours a week at minimum wage, at nonprofits and public agencies, with the goal of moving participants into regular jobs ⁶. Enrollment priority goes to veterans and qualified spouses, then to applicants who are over 65 or face listed barriers such as a disability, limited English, rural residence, or homelessness; to find the provider for your area, use CareerOneStop's Older Worker Program Finder ⁶.

Sources for this section: [6] [7]

The money conversation#

Plan for the pay cut before the leap, not after. In a 2012 MetLife Foundation and Civic Ventures report (Civic Ventures was later renamed Encore.org), people who had completed the switch reported that the transition took about 18 months on average, and 67 percent went through a stretch of earning little or nothing along the way, which most bridged with personal savings ⁸. Eighteen months of thin income is a solvable problem when it is in the plan and a painful surprise when it is not; budgeting in retirement covers how to build that bridge into a spending plan.

Three other money questions come up repeatedly. If you claim Social Security before your full retirement age and keep earning, the earnings test can temporarily withhold part of your benefit; working while receiving Social Security explains the thresholds. Encore jobs, especially part-time ones, often carry no health coverage, so anyone younger than 65 needs a plan for the years before Medicare. And a smaller paycheck still does quiet work in the background: every year of encore income is a year of drawing less from savings.

Sources for this section: [8]

Signals of an age-friendly employer#

Age discrimination is illegal and still common, so it saves time to aim at employers that show their work. The federal law that makes it illegal, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, covers workers 40 and older ¹¹. AARP's Employer Pledge, a public commitment to age-inclusive hiring with companies vetted before joining, ran from 2012 until March 2026, when it became the AARP Employer Alliance, a membership program for employers that want to recruit and keep older workers ¹²¹³. The separate Certified Age Friendly Employer program has evaluated employers on their practices toward workers 50 and older since 2006; the Age-Friendly Institute, which runs the assessments, became part of 55/Redefined in 2025 ¹⁴. Job postings carry signals too: phrases like "digital native" point one way, while benefits for part-time staff, flexible or phased schedules, and training open to all employees point the other.

Interviews run in both directions. Asking how the team handles flexible schedules, what training is available, and whether other career changers work there produces information; so does a hiring manager who bristles at the questions. If the doors stay shut, there are two well-worn alternatives: negotiating a phased retirement where you already work, or packaging your expertise as a business of your own. And for people who want the meaning without the W-2, finding purpose in retirement covers the unpaid routes to the same satisfaction.

Sources for this section: [11] [12] [13] [14]

RetiredWiki. (2026, July 18). Encore careers. https://retiredwiki.com/article/encore-careers