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After 28 years on the job, Barbara Peacock-Coady thought she was ready for retirement. "I wanted to remake myself," she recalls with a laugh.

But then reality set in and the woman who spent most of her life managing Workforce and Career Planning for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had an epiphany. She really didn't want to stop working. She just wanted to cut back on her duties. Five-weeks after Peacock-Coady officially retired at the age of 60, she was back at MIT, working part-time at her old job.

"It wasn't like I really went back," she says. "I just chose not to leave cold turkey."

Today, nearly two years after her official retirement, Peacock-Coady serves as a consultant to MIT on the aging workforce and teaches classes on life after retirement, helping others ease into their golden years as part of the school's Transitions at Work program. The courses, offered three times annually, teach retiring school employees how to make the move to life beyond MIT.

"It's more about making some choices early enough in your work life so you are prepared for what you want to do when your primary job ends," Peacock-Coady says of that training.

A declining pool of Generation Y laborers will create a void in the employment market that can be filled by older workers.

With the graying of the state's population, more workers will soon be facing those same decisions. For some, the choice will be easy. For others, faced with too little retirement savings or big bills at home, there will be only one alternative. But for those like Dick Chevrette, who spent 38 years as a manager at Massachusetts General Hospital, the decision will be based on more than money or free time.

"Reducing my hours gave me a chance to try part-time retirement and see how it works," says the 62-year-old Rockland resident, who

wanted to scale back his hours but wasn't quite ready to give up his job. Today, Chevrette has found the perfect balance in a part-time hospital security job that he says keeps him mentally alert, active, involved, and contributing to society.

Other older workers feel the same. According to a 2005 U.S. Census Bureau study, of the more than 3 million workers in Massachusetts, 9.1 percent are still working beyond their 60th birthday. With aging baby boomers on the cusp of retirement, that number is expected to increase even more over the next few years as a generation redefines life beyond retirement.

For those who stay in the job market, the options will be many. "There's a huge demographic shift taking place in the workforce," says Deborah Banda, Massachusetts director of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), noting that a declining pool of Generation Y laborers will create a void in the employment market that will need to be filled by older workers.

The healthcare and education fields will be particularly hard hit by a worker shortage, says Banda, but many in those industries are already preparing to tap into the retirement pool.

At the nonprofit group Operation Ability Based on Long Experience (A.B.LE.) of Greater Boston, senior workers receive computer and job search training to help them get their foot in the door. "More and more employers are realizing that the demographics are pretty compelling," says Joan Cirillo, Operation A.B.L.E.'s executive director. "And as employers get more enlightened, we are seeing some very creative retention programs to retain this expertise."

Even companies like insurance giant John Hancock recognize the knowledge, experience, dependability, and loyalty that older workers offer and are striving to keep them on the job, she says. At MIT, where more than 35 percent of the school's 10,000 workers are over the age of 55, officials make a strong attempt to recruit senior workers through its MITemps program, which places retiring staffers in part-time slots.

"It's a real plus for us when we can have knowledgeable workers, not only with life experience, but who know the particulars of an institution," says Ellen Cushman, a senior retirement councilor for the school.

MGH administrators are also working hard to retain retirees and recruit older hires. Currently, more than 5,100 hospital employees are over 50 years old, representing about 20 percent of the MGH staff, says Jeff Davis, the hospital's senior vice president for human resources.

"We recruit workers of any age," he says, noting that with no mandatory retirement age, the hospital allows physicians to work well into their 80s and beyond. In fact, Davis says, MGH recently added a woman in her 80s to the hospital's clerical support staff.

"For many, it's not just all about the money," Davis notes. "It's about that feeling of being around people and having real responsibility, which keeps them young, vibrant, physically active, and keeps their mind sharp. After all, he says, "work really is the Fountain of Youth."