This article comes from The Chronicle of Higher Education.
For 16 years, Russell Kearney awoke at 1:30 a.m. to hoist boxes of Wonder bread and Hostess cakes onto a truck and deliver them along a 120-mile route through eastern North Carolina.
After a decade, lifting and pushing thousands of pounds of bread — sometimes as much 10 tons a day — ruptured a disk in his back, making it feel “like my spine was cut in half,” Mr. Kearney says. But he continued to work for five more years, until finally, “I just couldn’t get out of the chair,” he says. “I just couldn’t do it any more.”
And so, at age 53, after a lifetime of working in heavy-labor jobs, Mr. Kearney took an unexpected detour from the delivery route he figured he’d be driving until retirement. This new road led straight to the classroom, a setting he hadn’t seen since graduating from high school in 1968. At nearby Lenoir Community College, he trained for a new kind of job, one that did not involve such strain on his body — a job, he hoped, that would give him a steady paycheck through the rest of his 50s and well into his 60s.
Mr. Kearney’s journey to college is becoming a common one among workers in the baby-boomer generation who are old enough to feel the strain of decades of physical labor, but too young to retire.
With the help of community colleges, some baby boomers are changing gears and retraining for new jobs that are less physically taxing. In doing so, these workers are among those who are redefining the traditional notion of retirement by working much later in life. And they are also leaving their mark on community colleges, many of which are fine-tuning their programs and making them more accessible to older adults. Click here to read the rest of this article.
Tags: Adult Education, Career Training
