Planning for the work to retirement transition: a study of the fundamentals, experiences, and models of retirement preparation programs.

Lack of retirement planning during the work to retirement transition could face retirees with serious mental, social, financial security, well-being challenges which make difficult retirement adjustment. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to study the theoretical literature of transition to retirement, introduce the experiences of leading countries and finally to explain the practical models of retirement preparation programs. Using the method of narrative analysis approach with the best and most comprehensive experiences, this paper has studied and reviewed theoretical concepts and various dimensions of the retirement program. Retirement preparation programs refer to all formally organized interventions designed by companies to assist employees in making decisions about and adjusting to retirement and can be classified into two broad categories including planning and counseling. Moreover, these programs have been mainly implemented using individual and group approaches and are classified into divided into three categories including comprehensive, medium and limited, in terms of scope. The international experience has also shown that some organizations have just designed retirement guidelines and others have developed more complex and comprehensive retirement preparation program. In this paper, first the experiences of some leading organizations in compiling the Retirement guidelines were explained and then various executive models of the retirement preparation program are introduced. In this regard, Individual-Resource, Individual Counseling, Presentation-Audience, Stimulus-Discussion, Multi-Group Workshop, and Facilitated Interaction Group model have been discussed. Finally, a comprehensive framework along with its necessary infrastructure has been proposed to formulate retirement preparation programs.