The new meaning of retirement for bridge employees: Situating bridge employment through the lens of the Kaleidoscope Career Model

Retirees re-entering the workforce, popularly termed as bridge employment, is a phenomenon that is anticipated to increase in the coming years. Though research establishes that these employees have unique aspirations and work motives (see Mazumdar et al., 2020), primary research on how the retirement transition and bridge employment shape each other is scarce. This is troubling because a better understanding of the aspirations and motives of potential employees is an important step in designing suitable employee development strategies. To fill this gap in the literature, our paper explores the significance of retirement for those retirees who engage in bridge employment. We also explore whether bridge employment is unique from pre-retirement employment. We interviewed 26 bridge employees and analyzed their narrations using the thematic analysis method. We utilized the Kaleidoscope Career Model by Mainiero and Sullivan (2005) to contextualize our analysis. Our study reveals that bridge employees uniquely reconstruct the meaning of retirement as a frontier between “prioritizing the obligations” and “prioritizing self.” Our findings also demonstrate how this view allows retirees to prioritize self-directed goals during bridge employment. Our paper enriches the human resource development literature on careers and retirement by examining it from the vantage point of bridge employees. We shed light on how re-framing the narratives of retirement helps distinguish between bridge employment and pre-retirement employment for retirees. Better understanding this distinction can help lay the foundation for crafting suitable employee development programs for improved motivation and retention.