Once Nancy Drake’s pastor suggested she had a calling in the ministry, the idea wouldn’t let go of her. Photo by Milton Hinnant/Dallas Morning News.

It’s worth quoting the rest of the headline on this story: “Boomers search for purpose could mean a huge change in the workforce.”

Indeed, purpose is the essential core of the encore idea, the ingredient that makes an encore career something different from simply working longer.

Writer Bob Moos found Nancy Drake, who had planned to return to the banking career she had left to raise her family, but instead found her calling as a pastor, counseling parishioners through trying times.

“When we were young, we thought we could change the world,” Drake, now 61, told Moos. “Now that we’re older, I guess we still do.”

The article also features Mike Redmond, who retired from GTE at age 56 and began volunteering at an East Dallas nonprofit that helps unemployed people get back on their feet. Then he got hired as director of operations, managing the center’s day-to-day activities.

And Jim Siegried, who is becoming a fifth-grade math teacher at 53, after a career as an IBM customer service manager. He got help from IBM’s Transition to Teaching program, which provides subsidies of up to $15,000 for employees who want to move into teaching.

The establishment of such transition paths are critical if society is to capture the impulse among many boomers to, as Siegfried put it, “give back.”

“Having done well, they want to do good,” Marc Freedman, author of Encore tells Moos. “They’re not content to be Wal-Mart greeters, which is just as well because that hardly constitutes the best use of the most educated older generation in history.”

AARP, the nation’s largest lobbying organization, is also heralding the encore opportunity. Moos quotes Deborah Russell, AARP’s director of workforce issues who says boomers’ interest in “socially significant second careers” could lead to the biggest change in the workforce since the women’s movement 40 years ago.

“They represent a windfall of talent that could help solve the labor shortages we face in teaching, nursing and other social services,” Russell says. “It’s the silver lining in the graying of America.”