However, he also has a warning for current CIOs either heading for or contemplating semi-retirement.

"I certainly haven't in any aggressive way gone after work; I have probably gone aggressively not after work, but I think for many people the jobs don't come as easily as they think they will. If your goal is just to scale back, but you still need the income, then I think you need to be more proactive in terms of looking for opportunities. Whereas I think if you're in a situation where you really are retiring because you have worked your 30 or 40 years and you have had it, and you don't really need the income, you can take a very different approach to life."

He says whether or not retiring CIOs decide to become company directors, their specialist knowledge gives them the tools to examine the likely future uptake of leading edge technologies like VoIP, the mobile market and storage, and make their killing on the market. "If you're a technologist you're on the leading edge of figuring out what they are up to but most of us don't have the time."

Culture of Taboo

In 2004 AAP reported that many senior executives are reluctant to reveal their retirement plans, fearing they will be marginalized, according to a survey conducted that same year by executive recruitment firm Highland Partners. As a result, says Highland Partners chief executive Dan Dumitrescu, companies are losing intellectual capital and expertise, which could directly affect their bottom line.

"One of the most significant and worrying outcomes from the survey was the culture of taboo that exists in some organizations surrounding any discussion of retirement," he says. "Executives told us they were reluctant to mention retirement because they had seen numerous occasions when retiring senior executives were marginalized, dropped from e-mail lists, not invited to meetings, and generally regarded as no longer likely to be pulling their weight."

The survey found that 53 percent of companies did not have policies or practices to encourage part-time, casual or other work by senior employees in the run-up to, or after, retirement.

"I see a lot of people who work in the IT industry," says psychologist and mentor Susan Scanlan. "I imagine that they are well set up to use their IT skills in retirement in perhaps a more personally satisfying way, rather than to fulfil their job description. I also think this concept of retirement is a lot about enjoying the process and not so much about an end product."

"It's important to keep growing," says Tom DeMarco, a consultant at Cutter Consortium in Arlington, Massachusetts, in the US. "As we learned from the 1990s and again in the downturn in 2004, corporations have no particular loyalty, even to people on the brink of retirement. If I were an employee in that stage of my career, I'd want to learn and get certified" - in growing technologies such as J2EE and .Net, DeMarco says. "The key to end-of-career planning is to not treat it like the end of your career."

Diverging Paths

CIOs wishing to move on from the CIO career have numbers of options, including moving into academia. Gary Oliver dropped a PhD in Information Systems when he took up the position of CIO with the Australian Graduate School of Management (AGSM), and now at 53, while a good way from retiring, has moved on from the AGSM and is happily returning to an academic appointment at the University of Sydney to complete the degree.

"I want to finish off my PhD in information sharing and I'm about a year away from it," Oliver remarks. "Research is my real direction. I was a CIO in industry before I became an academic and I wanted to become an academic."

Universities in Australia, especially the top four, are under enormous pressure to produce practical and industry-relevant research, Oliver says, so he plans to stay close to his existing industry and sector connections as he helps the University of Sydney to do just that.

Many CIOs, of course, choose to set up their own private consultancies when they retire, knowing it is likely there will be a huge appetite for their expertise (see "Considering a Consulting Career", page 102). "I think there are [former] CIOs who do a lot of the informal contracting and consulting and advisory work," says Tony Rossano, senior client partner with Korn/Ferry International. "They tend to set up small, nimble operations."