You’ve Got a Job to Do: Reflections on Career Choices - Part One
What does your job mean to you ? Is it a career you’ve trained for, in a field you love and are committted to ? Do you wake up every day happy eager to get to work ? In contrast, is it a mere job, just a means to an end, a paycheck at the end of every week or month ? Is it routine and numbingly dull ? Does it make you dread getting out of bed in the morning ? Perhaps you gain your livelihood in a so-so job doing something that’s bearable, but never stimulating or challenging. It’s just okay, and you constantly tell yourself that it could be worse. Is your job some combination of all three types ? You may do something that once stimulated and excited you, but has since lost its spark, to the point where you’re now just going through the motions.
The release of the new Indiana Jones movie has got me thinking about the subject. Some archaeologists are enthusiastic, because new Indiana Jones films boost enrollments in university archaeology programs. I wonder how many of those recruits stick with it over the years and actually become archaeologists, or other types of anthropologists. How disappointed were some of them when they discovered that archaeology doesn’t really involve daily battles beteween good and evil, or bullwhip fights in far-off exotic lands ? Were they able to settle down to a life of teaching, or of patiently sifting through soil, one square foot at a time ?
How often do you think about what your job means to you and how did you choose it ? Was it a passion for a certain subject or did you back into it ? Did you study a discipline for years or receive a token day of on-the-job training ? Exactly how do most people choose their jobs ? Are there firefighters who had wanted to be a fireman since they were six years old ? Do family pressures or family career traditions determine certain choices, such as the expectation that someone will become a doctor or a lawyer just like mom or dad ? Are there people who enter a university with a specific goal in mind and are never deterred from it, or do most students enter college with some hazy sense of getting a liberal arts education, hoping that at some point some subject will click with them ? Do changing job markets and employmant statisistics seriously affect career decisions ?
How much of an impact do a field’s perks have on choices made ? For example, flight attendants are given the opportunity to travel, and insurance company employees may receive insurance premium reductions. Do such priorities shift as we move from one stage of life to another ? Lots of travel as part of a job may be a career incentive for a young single person, but it may become a job liability when someone is later raising a young family.
What role do issues related to working hours play ? Is a day job necessarily preferable to the graveyard shift ? Is a regular five day working week inherently better than a longer cycle of on-duty and off-duty days ? What about jobs that involve seasonal cycles of slow and busy periods, such as those of tax accountants and hotel workers in tourist resorts ?
How important is the geographic location of a given job opportunity or of a place-specific type of career ? There are those who want to remain in their home towns or regions, while others are dying to pull up stakes and experience new locales, or to find jobs that will pay them for having adventures in far-flung corners of the earth.
Is money always a primary consideration, or is the importance of money drastically overestimated as a deciding factor in career choice ? Certainly a high-paying job is the essential motivation and goal for some people, yet there are others who dedicate their lives to public service work or to working for justice and social change at the expense of a decent paycheck.
What points relating to temperament enter into the career decisions that we make in life ? For example, breaking into any area of show business may require a certain type of personality. How many of us could stand the discouraging frequency of rejection experienced by most would-be actors ? Does the acting bug involve both a larger than average ego, plus a larger than normal persistence of vision and resilience in the face of rejection ?
Speaking of temperaments, how do national characteristics and traditions affect career posssibilities ? In certain western countries the average person takes a job and stays in it for forty years with his or her eyes on the prize – guaranteed retirement checks. There is an overall fear of ever taking a risk. Most employees would never dream of trying to start their own businesses and people often seem reluctant even to consider changing jobs, let alone to ever consider the unthinkable concept of actually changing careers. Nothing can get in the way of that guaranteed retirement package.
This is the end of part one.
Visit Barbara Freedman De Vito’s shop for Job T-Shirts, Magnets, Mugs, other gifts and clothing with job words and sayings.
You’ve Got a Job to Do: Reflections on Career Choices - Part One / Author: Barbara Freedman-De Vito
Barbara has spent years as a children’s librarian, teacher, professional storyteller, puppeteer, author and artist.
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