Abstract:
Despite significant attention being paid to job crafting of individual employees,
career crafting remains a relatively new area of focus, especially in
understanding how older workers navigate their post-retirement work
engagements. However, career crafting holds substantial potential for
deepening our understanding of the post-retirement careers of retired
employees. This paper aims to understand why and how retirees engage in
career-crafting behaviours in their post-retirement work engagements.
Adopting a qualitative approach, this study draws on focus group interviews with
23 retirees from four districts in Sri Lanka. Findings highlight that Retirees
adopt cognitive, relational, and task crafting to redefine work, relationships, and
activities, making post-retirement work purposeful, flexible, and identityenhancing
while revealing the post-retirement career crafting among Sri Lankan
retirees is shaped by motivations such as self-reinvention, autonomy, family
bonding, and defying aging stereotypes, reflecting both personal agency and
cultural values.
