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This paper aims to reflect on retirement, showing its different viewpoints, advocating the need to understand the issue from a procedural and multidimensional perspective, and especially, defending a more active role of human resource management in the process.

This paper presents a theoretical framework of retirement, based on a procedural and multidimensional perspective.

To study how individuals adapt to retirement permits the discovery, for example, of how they obtain the quality of life after the transition and how they manage the internal and external aspects of the process. Human resource management must treat retirement as a complex and multidimensional phenomenon. This means it should consider retirement not only as a decision but also as a process.

This essay seeks to reflect on retirement, advocating the need to understand the issue from a procedural and multidimensional perspective, and especially, defending a more active role of human resource management in the process.

The article aims at analyzing the social representations of retirement in two different groups of professors – pre-retired and retired – from a public higher education institution. The goal is to explore the experiences, reflections, beliefs, and attitudes originated from the transition to retirement.

The research, of exploratory and descriptive nature, was guided by the Social Representation Theory (SRT) and took a qualitative approach. 16 professors were interviewed, 8 in each group (pre-retired and retired professors), using semi-structured interviews that followed a script designed to discover the main aspects of the transition to retirement.

Three figurative cores were raised – the financial aspect, the centrality of work, and the will to continue contributing, and the unpreparedness for retirement – and testimonies have shown heterogeneous representations. The study observed that although relevant, the bonus for continued services is not the main determinant for professors to continue working in the university.

The results of this study indicate the need to treat retirement as a complex and multidimensional process, offering a fresh perspective on the social representations of retirement in the academic context. The use of the Social Representation Theory to explore these perspectives adds to the originality of the approach, highlighting the multifaceted nature of the retirement process in this specific professional group.