Workforce expert Tamara Erickson shows boomers how to challenge their assumptions about work in her book, Retire Retirement: Career Strategies for the Boomer Generation (Harvard Business Press, hardcover, $19.99).

Erickson outlines how human resource professionals can think about tapping this workforce as well as provides techniques on navigating the generational differences with Boomers, Gen X and Gen Y. Here’s an excerpt from her book.

Sort Through Your Options

These frameworks are not the options themselves. They are the filters through which you may choose to view each possibility—to search for options consistent with the Career Curve and Life Lures that work best for you.

Career Curve: Understanding the Intensity of Work

Over the second half of the twentieth century, employees’ relationships with corporate work have tended to follow a very predictable path: most careers began slowly; workers paid their dues with hard work and, often, long hours as they moved step by step up the career hierarchy. Most employees reached their personal pinnacle (or perhaps one step beyond, if you believe in the Peter Principle!) some time in their mid-forties to mid-fifties—their peak of power, prestige, and earning potential. Then, most had a Friday-afternoon retirement party, and—suddenly—found themselves by Monday morning lying in a hammock. Retired!

In today’s reality, this makes little sense. This curve doesn’t track with our physical or intellectual energy levels; for many it doesn’t work financially; and increasingly, it’s a huge problem for corporations, which just can’t afford to lose major contributors through an abrupt exodus.

Boomers need to lead the way to define new Career Curves. For most of you, this path will probably resemble a bell-shaped-curve. Rather than the cliff-shaped career paths of the past century—individuals on an ever-upward path toward ever-greater “success” until a very sudden end —most twenty-first-century careers are likely to show a career deceleration phase in workers’ fifties through eighties that mirrors the career development phase of their twenties through forties. After achieving peak levels of responsibility in midcareer, individuals will be able to continue to contribute to businesses in legitimate and respected, although less rigorous, ways. Most individuals today, although they want to continue working in some way, do not want to work as long or as intensely as they have up to now—they want to cut back.

Others, however, and perhaps particularly women who have deferred their career ambitions over the past several decades, will want to do more, not less. Some of you see this as your moment (finally) to shine— a second shot at realizing your ambition. If your career has been to some degree on hold because of challenges and responsibilities you’ve had in other parts of your life, you may be itching with a newfound sense of energy for this new stage. Or, you may have a wholly new dream—a new profession or entrepreneurial goal—that will also tap more, rather than less, energy and time going forward. The bell-shaped curve will not be the path for all Boomers. Your next stage may look more like a series of bells—as one friend pointed out, a carillon.

If you think you’d like a “bell-shaped” curve, there are a number of options to consider for what the second half might look like. Some firms are beginning to offer some variation of “phased retirement”—ways to reduce the