When Sharon White was growing up, her career goal was clear: “I wanted to find a way to make money,” she recalls.

An African-American woman who grew up in Compton, California in the 1950s, White pursued a career in business, acquiring degrees in accounting, business administration and finance along the way. Last month she retired at age 61 from her job as a financial analyst at Boeing Corp. after a successful 34-year career in the aerospace industry.

As retirement approached, she found herself thinking about new challenges—and ways to leave a positive legacy. “I’ve done more than I dreamed I could do, because my dreams weren’t that big when I was young. And I had help along the way from a lot of people, so you want to find a way to give back. I wanted to figure out where I was going next, and how to find my passion.”

White thinks she may have found the answer in teaching. She is enrolled in the Encorps Teachers Program, one of the country’s most innovative programs for midlife career transition. Encorps is a public-private partnership dedicated to increasing the number of much-needed math and science teachers in California’s public middle and high schools. White heard about Encorps through Boeing, one of the program’s corporate sponsors. She is among the first class of recruits undergoing a rigorous training process aimed at transitioning to a second career in education.

Encorps is the brainchild of California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sherry Lansing, one of Hollywood’s most respected leaders. Lansing retired in 2005 from the helm at Paramount Pictures following a career of almost 30 years producing major movie hits (her credits include Forrest Gump, Braveheart and Titanic). Following retirement, Lansing started her own foundation, which focuses on cancer research, education and the arts. Lansing also has a special interest in second careers for baby boomers.

“I was very fortunate to have achieved my dreams in my own career,” Lansing says, “and I started thinking about what I could do to give back. As I looked around, I saw that post-boomers and boomers are a huge asset. We have all these talented people who want something new. They’ve done what they wanted to do in their first careers, and they’re not burned out. They want a new challenge.”

A survey released last month confirms a broad move in this direction among people approaching retirement. The MetLife Foundation/Civic Ventures Encore Career Survey found that half of Americans aged 44 to 70 contemplating second careers hope to move into jobs in fields like education, health care, government or the non-profit sector.

Encorp aims to address a particular need in the field of education. Like many states, California is facing a teacher shortage over the next decade. The state expects more than 100,000 to retire in the next ten years, with about 33,000 of the vacated jobs in science and math classrooms.

Lansing modeled Encorps on a similar program launched in 2005 by IBM Corp. called Transition to Teaching. The company wanted to help employees fulfill their desire to give back to the community—but also to help meet its own future need for scientists and engineers by funneling qualified teachers back into the schools.

“We have incredible math and science professionals at IBM,” said Robin Willner, IBM’s vice president of global community initiatives. “They’re some of the best-educated 50-year-olds to ever walk the planet, and they are trying to figure out what to do next. Many of them have a strong interest in education and volunteering, and getting kids excited about math and science.”

IBM invests $15,000 in training for each Transition to Teaching participant. So far 100 IBM employees have participated, and are in the process of moving into math and science teaching jobs around the country.

“We feel strongly that its not just about content,” Willner says. “You start with math and science expertise, which is priceless. But there is a lot to know about teaching—teaching 12-year-olds is not like working in an IBM software lab.

“We encourage [our teacher candidates] to take their time, get their certification and do some student teaching. That way, when they leave IBM and walk into the classroom, they are ready to be great teachers.”

Of course, not every company has the resources of a giant like IBM to devote to encore careers. That’s where the Encorps model is especially useful, because it provides a support system for companies that participate. Sponsoring companies agree to provide $15,000 for training of each employee who enrolls, but Encorps manages the program.

Encorp has interviewed 26 teaching candidates so far, and has enrolled seven; all were selected for their very high level of career knowledge and experience. The first batch will be teaching in California classrooms this fall, according to Jennifer Anastasoff, Encorps’ chief executive.

The transition process isn’t easy. There’s an intensive application process aimed at making certain that an applicant is really ready to move into teaching, and that includes a state-required competency test. Successful applicants then commit to 120 hours of pre-service training and classroom experience. At the same time they take teacher-training classes through the California state university system.

“Our ultimate goal is impact,” says Anastasoff. “We are evaluating ourselves on how effectively our teachers can improve the achievement of kids.”

Anastasoff, 33, started her career as a teaching assistant in Compton, California, and later taught 6th grade in the Teach for America program in Houston, Texas. “Within a couple years I was the senior teacher in our group,” she says, “and that signaled to me a larger challenge, which is a fissure in our educational system, and the need to improve our human capital.”

She was drawn to Encorps by the prospect of tapping into the talent pool of people retiring from the corporate sector. “This is the way to do it. I am 120 percent committed to getting great teachers into the classroom. There’s no other way to make the level of difference we want to make.”

Resources

Q&A with Sherry Lansing at Encore Careers.

Encore: Finding Work that Matters in the Second Half of Life. Marc Freedman, founder of Civic Ventures, on launching your second career.

Learn about teaching. Resources at IBM’s Transition to Teaching site.

Tags | encore career, second careers, teaching