The greater pluriformity of the working population, the increasing importance of other areas of life (for example, the need for “quality time” with family and friends, leisure), the increasing importance of differences in coping style and personality, the ever-increasing individualisation, urge a more specific approach than the traditional categorisations of life phases, career peaks, career success, learning needs, and retirement age (see also Van der Heijden, 2005). Modern employees have highly different ideas about career issues in comparison with employees in the past. In addition, because of the increasing diversity and flexibility, employees nowadays continuously have to search individually for answers on career-related questions such as: How long do I have to go on? How long will I be allowed to? How long do I still have? How long do I want to go on? Future research will need to change focus from process models of career research and descriptive analyses (what? when? whom?) towards explanatory models (why?). Interdisciplinary research, based upon better conceptualisations of the age construct, and aimed at developing empirically grounded theories supporting employability and well-being (see Fugate et al., 2004; Van der Heijde and Van der Heijden, 2006) throughout the life-span, and ideally performed by a cross-national group of investigators, has the potential to add significantly to existing theory and practice. Moreover, further research is needed in order to address the issue of causality. Research using multi-wave designs can provide more specific information about the stability and change of career-related factors and outcomes, as well as about cross-lagged (i.e. over time) relationships (De Lange, 2005; Taris and Kompier, 2003). Also, more research is needed to investigate the extent to which the outcomes of the studies that are presented in this special issue generalise to other occupational settings and/or to other countries. Nevertheless, we think that the results presented in this special issue are noteworthy and provide good challenges for future research and for cross-validation in different organisational settings and countries. This special issue presents some state-of-the-art contributions to research on long-term career development and early retirement. As career researchers, our ultimate goal is in facilitating healthy, prosperous and challenging careers, as well as smooth transitions to new career stages throughout working life and into retirement. We believe that the contributions in this special issue add towards this goal.