What Your Career Type Predicts About Your Retirement
Why different careers leave different gaps

When we started collecting assessment data in earnest, I expected the six dimensions to move roughly together. Someone who scored well on Health would probably score well on Passion. Someone who scored low on Purpose would probably score low on People. The logic would be that general life-readiness was a trait, and the score pattern would reflect that trait.

That’s not what the data shows.

What the data shows, with growing clarity as the sample has grown, is that different careers leave different gaps. The dimensions you score well on and the dimensions you struggle with are substantially predicted by what you did for a living — not just how much money you made or how senior you got, but the kind of work you did. The career was doing some of your retirement preparation for you, invisibly, for decades. When the career ends, you find out which pieces the job was handling and which pieces it wasn’t.

This post is about those patterns. It’s not a full taxonomy — the data isn’t big enough for that — but the patterns that have emerged for the two largest career groups are consistent enough that I’m comfortable naming them. If you recognize your career archetype below, you’ll probably recognize the gaps the archetype tends to leave. Knowing which gaps to expect is the first move in addressing them.

The Headline Pattern

Across 220 completed assessments (n=144 since the current scoring rubric), five of the six dimensions cluster tightly between 7.3 and 7.4: Health, Wealth, People, Place, and Passion. Purpose is the outlier at 6.7.

When you break that down by career type, the clustering holds at the aggregate level. But the shape of each individual score is different. The corporate executive who scores 7.3 on People scored there for reasons that are completely different from the reasons the entrepreneur scored 7.6 on Passion. The average is the same. The substance is different.

Here’s what we see.

Corporate / Executive

Sample size in our data: n=53 · Overall readiness: 7.3 · Strongest dimension: People · Typical gap: Purpose, with Passion a close second

Corporate careers — senior executives, function heads, team leaders inside medium and large companies — have a specific shape below the waterline. The work structured relationships. Daily, weekly, quarterly, for decades. You had a team. You had peers. You had customers you spoke with regularly. You had a calendar that brought people together. The result is a deep, thick, highly maintained People dimension. Corporate executives in our data score People as their strongest dimension more often than any other archetype does.

That’s the good news. The less good news is that Purpose and Passion are frequently thin. Not because executives lack purpose or interest, but because the work was supplying so much of what Purpose and Passion require that there was less need to build it externally. The corporate calendar was carrying the psychological paycheck. Jahoda’s framework applies here almost diagrammatically: time structure, social contact, collective purpose, status, activity — all supplied, daily, by the firm.

When corporate executives retire, the People dimension holds up for a while before it starts to thin. The relationships that felt like community were often proximity-based — sustained by the same calendar that’s now gone. Robin Dunbar’s research on social-network decay in the absence of shared context is directly relevant here. Within six to twelve months, the corporate executive who scored 8 on People at retirement is often a 6 on People eighteen months in, without ever having made a mistake — just because the infrastructure that was maintaining those relationships has stopped running.

The Purpose and Passion gaps, meanwhile, are immediate. The day after retirement, the person who was running an organization is not running anything. The person who was on ten calendars a week is on none. The question what am I supposed to do today? arrives with no institutional answer.

If you’re a corporate executive: expect the People dimension to hold up for a year and then decline unless you intentionally rebuild the infrastructure. Expect Purpose and Passion to feel shaky immediately. The work isn’t to find new friends — your relationship skills are strong and your network is wide. The work is to rebuild the weekly infrastructure that was maintaining the relationships you already have, and to build Purpose and Passion from scratch, which you haven’t had to do in decades.

Entrepreneur / Founder

Sample size in our data: n=13 · Overall readiness: 7.6 · Strongest dimension: Passion · Typical gap: harder to name — the archetype is more even than the others

Entrepreneurs in our data score the highest overall of any archetype we’ve been able to measure. The sample is small — thirteen is hypothesis-generating, not conclusive — but the pattern is consistent enough to be worth naming.

The reason entrepreneurs score well, I think, is that entrepreneurial identity is already partly detached from employment. If you founded something, you weren’t doing a job — you were running a project that happened to provide income. When the project ends, the identity doesn’t collapse the way an employed identity collapses, because the entrepreneurial identity was never “I work at X.” It was “I build things.” That identity travels. It survives the transition.

Passion, in particular, scores well for entrepreneurs. The generative engagement that work provided is a skill they’re already exercising outside of the specific business — they have ideas, they start things, they get curious, they build. The retirement version of that is just a continuation in a different domain. The instinct is there.

What I’d watch for in the entrepreneur archetype is a subtler risk: retirement as a pivot point that exposes how much of the entrepreneur’s identity was organized around “the next thing.” If the next thing doesn’t appear, the absence can be destabilizing in ways that look different from the corporate executive’s Purpose gap. For entrepreneurs, the question isn’t “what am I supposed to do today?” It’s “what am I pointing at?”

If you’re an entrepreneur or founder: your overall readiness is probably higher than you think. The gaps to watch for are not the obvious ones. The subtle one is whether you have a “next thing” that carries the energy a previous venture did — and if not, whether you have the self-awareness to notice the absence before it becomes a problem. The other one is People: entrepreneurs often have wide networks but shallow ones, and retirement can expose how few relationships are built on non-transactional ground.

What we’ve also seen, from very small samples

Two other career groups have shown up in our data with directional patterns that match what the framework would predict. The samples are small enough — two completers each — that I want to flag what we’re seeing without claiming it as an archetype yet.

Government, military, and long-term public-service careers have shown notably lower overall readiness than other groups (7.3 cluster average vs. ~5.6 in our two completers). The direction is consistent with what we’d predict from the Jahoda framework: the work was often mission-driven in an explicit way, the identity structure is service-oriented rather than role-oriented, and pension-based finances differ from 401(k)-based models in ways the generic retirement industry doesn’t handle well. The civilian-corporate retirement template the assessment was built against may inadvertently under-serve this population. If you’re a public-sector retiree: the work ahead has more to do with identity-of-service than identity-of-role — rebuilding Purpose isn’t about finding something to do, it’s about finding something to serve. That’s a harder and more specific question than “what are my interests?”

Individual contributors, technical craftspeople, and specialists — engineers, writers, artists, scientists, skilled craftspeople — have shown the opposite pattern: very high readiness in our two completers, with Purpose and Passion as their strongest dimensions. The mechanism makes sense: their craft was the source. The work didn’t depend on the company — it depended on them. When the job ends, the craft continues. The identity around “what I do” doesn’t require a title to exist. If you’re in this archetype: Purpose and Passion are probably doing fine. Wealth, structurally, may also be fine. Where to look hardest is People — specifically, whether any of your significant relationships are non-transactional, regular, and about you-the-person rather than you-the-practitioner.

Both directions match what we’d expect. Both will get more confident as the sample grows.

The Implication of Archetype Patterns

Knowing your archetype doesn’t tell you what to do. It tells you where to look first.

Most retirement advice is generic — some version of “make sure you have purpose, make sure you stay healthy, make sure your money lasts.” That advice is true, but it’s not useful, because it treats the audience as undifferentiated. In reality, the shape of your retirement challenge is substantially predicted by the shape of your career. The corporate executive and the entrepreneur are walking into different retirements. They need different first moves.

What the TRS assessment is doing, underneath the scores, is surfacing your specific pattern. The dimension scores tell you where you are. The archetype context tells you where you probably came from and what that probably means for what you’re about to navigate.

Here’s the practical frame. Before you look at your dimension scores, guess what your archetype would predict. If you’re a corporate executive, predict that People is your strongest and Purpose is your weakest. If you’re an entrepreneur, predict that Passion is your strongest and that the overall score will be high but uneven.

Then look at your scores. If they match your archetype prediction, you’ve confirmed the gaps and you know where to start. If they don’t match, that’s also information — it usually means you’ve already done some invisible work on the dimension your career would have been expected to leave weak, and the work ahead is different from the default prescription.

What We’re Learning About the Framework

The six-dimension framework was built against a generic retirement template — what we thought most retirees would face. The data is now telling us that “most retirees” isn’t really a category. Most retirees are one of several archetypes, and the shape of the challenge depends on which one.

In the next version of the assessment, we’re going to ask about career archetype earlier in the conversation — probably in the first three exchanges — and adapt the depth of probing for each dimension based on what the archetype predicts. A corporate executive doesn’t need generic passion prompts; they need structured-belonging prompts. An entrepreneur doesn’t need generic identity prompts; they need “what are you pointing at now?” prompts. A public-service retiree doesn’t need 401(k) stress tests; they need a different Wealth conversation entirely.

This is one of the ways the tool gets better with data. Early on, we had to ask everyone the same questions because we didn’t have the signal to personalize. With 220 completed assessments, the personalization signal is there. The archetype-tuned version is coming.

In the meantime, if you’re taking the assessment or thinking about it, know this: the six dimensions are universal. The shape of your specific gap within those dimensions is not. It’s predicted, meaningfully, by what you spent the last thirty or forty years doing. Start with the archetype. Then look at the scores. Then decide where the work is.