Encore: Work that matters in the second half of life.

Leigh Hoes, 51, trained to become a pharmacy technician in a one-year program at Richland College. She plans to work into her 60s or 70s. Photo by Randy Eli Grothe/Dallas Morning News.

Boomers are “rebooting” at Richland College in Dallas, one of the new wave of community colleges that are reshaping their programs to meet the new needs of career-switching baby boomers.

The college’s “Boomer Reboot” courses, launched this month, bridge a gap between Richland’s lifelong learning offerings through its “Emeritus” and its regular job-training programs in health care and teaching, which also serve dozens of people making midlife career transitions.

The range of offerings illustrate the unsettled nature of the boomer “market,” where more people are seeking “encore careers,” while others are moving toward more traditional retirement. The Reboot program will offer job-search skills such as how to write a résumé that emphasizes experience rather than age and how to field interview questions.

“Four in five boomers have told pollsters they intend to work past their traditional retirement age, and many want to find new jobs with a higher social purpose and more flexible hours,” the Dallas Morning News reported in an article on Richland’s new program.

“Labor analysts, meanwhile, predict the U.S. economy will face shortages of 6 million workers by 2012 and 35 million workers by 2030. The hardest-hit fields will be education, health care and public service,” writes reporter Bob Moos.

Judy Goggin, a vice president for Civic Ventures, told Moos that the two trends present a historic opportunity for community colleges.

“The time’s right for developing programs for boomers trying to launch the next phase of their working lives and for employers faced with a brain drain over the next couple of decades,” Goggin said.

The article also highlights Collin College in Allen, Texas, which is training downized telecom engineers and technology veterans to become math teachers within one year. Collin has a grant from the MetLife Foundation/Civic Ventures Community College Encore Career project.

Goggin told the newspaper boomers who enroll in community college programs expect a “clear path to employment” after graduation. “They don’t want to jump through a lot of hoops.”