Posted 11/16/2009 - 11:43am
Editor’s note: This column appeared in BusinessWeek’s special report, “The Case Against Retirement.”
After 25 years of climbing her first ladder at Hewlett-Packard, Gina Cassinelli knew it was time for a change. “All of a sudden, you wake up and you say…I can’t believe I’ve been here 20 or 25 years,” she recalls. “I loved what I did, but I don’t want to do it for 20 more.”
Cassinelli took early retirement, then tried to open a new career door with few guides and little help. “You get to a point in your life where you have to feel like what you’re doing matters,” Cassinelli says. “But how to do it? That’s hard.”
The road used to be much easier. For 50 years, the average fiftysomething American was headed inexorably toward a clear-cut career and life transition: the transition to a leisure-based retirement.