Rusine Mitchell Sinclair left a 25-year career at IBM last year “to bring my experiences as an IBM executive to thousands of girls across North Carolina.”

Now, IBM is helping other executives and managers follow Sinclair to the nonprofit sector. The Financial Times calls IBM’s program a “Retirement Plan with a Difference.”

Opportunities for nonprofit leadership are listed in a section on the IBM intranet that helps employees transition to encore careers with a social purpose.

Stanley Litow, head of corporate citizenship and president of the IBM International Foundation, told the FT’s Sarah Murray, “We know a lot of employees find their way to the voluntary sector anyway. But knowing generally about the opportunities is not the same as having a clear path from your first career to a second career.”

American Express, Bank of America and Gap are taking a different approach to fill the nonprofit leadership gap, offering executive training to nonprofit managers, according to BusinessWeek. Amex recently held a weeklong “Nonprofit Leadership Academy” for two dozen nonprofit executives. Amex CEO Kenneth Chenault says the goal is to “leverage our existing tools to make a major impact in the nonprofit world.”

IBM’s program created in conjunction with Bridgestar, is designed to help employees overcome the kind of challenges Sinclar faced when she left IBM to manage the North Carolina Coastal Pines chapter of the Girl Scouts.

Sinclair, for example, quickly learned that she would be required to do more of the heavy lifting. “In some ways it’s going back to the kind of work I did earlier in my career, where I did more of the arms and legs work,” she told Murray.

The hierarchy is different, too, Sinclair found. “In a for-profit you have an organization that you manage and there’s still a lot of command and control. In an organization where success resides in the hands of people who are volunteers, you have to take a completely different approach to motivating them,” she said.

David Simms, managing partner of Bridgestar, said the program is designed to help IBM employees understand the challenges ahead before they make the sector switch. Among the ways nonprofits differ from for-profits, he noted, are the fact that “mission comes first and financials are resources to accomplish mission, not the end goal of the organization.”

A major challenge, Simms said, is avoiding the burn-out that some nonprofit leaders experience because they lack resources, yet wish to make a difference, and therefore work long hours.

By giving employees a preview of what’s in store and supporting them through the transition, the IBM-Bridgestar program hopes to attract more candidates who are ideal for leadership roles in the nonprofit world.