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Just Choose Another Career!
by Nina Baruch
At first I was confused. Hadn't I carefully planned my career? How come it wasn't
working for me anymore? Where had I gone wrong?
At this stage I started hearing about second careers, and multiple careers.
Apparently, planning one career a lifetime, in a changing labor world, wasn't
enough anymore. In order to bring back a sense of security into my life, I
needed to learn completely new skills. Instead of sticking with what I knew
and had been doing for years, I had to learn how to let go of the past, give
up old and useless plans and methods, and learn new skills. I had to keep
my mind open and become attuned to a constantly changing world, without
it letting me be shoved aside time and again.
How Did It All Began?
The concept of having a career - one or more a lifetime - developed alongside
the labor market, creating more and more professions and occupations for
workers. This new reality was enhanced by liberal ideas developed during
the 18th and 19th centuries, about the right to choose an occupation, and find
in it not only a source of income but also a sense of fulfillment.
Toward the end of the 20th century, the idea of personal choice and self direction
was aided by the power of the Internet, which increased the acceptance of people
having multiple types of jobs, and the concept of having more than one career
a lifetime.
"The plethora of choices and widespread education made the concept of career
plan very fashionable and popular, and created a new profession - career
counselor and career advisor", says the Wikipedia, the Internet free
encyclopedia. "Since many adults nowadays having dual or multiple careers,
professional identities, which once used to be a lifetime identity, have become
hybridized to reflect this shift in work ethic. These multiple careers can either
be concurrent (where a worker has two simultaneous careers) or sequential
(where a worker adopts a new career after having worked for some time in
another career). Both may occur for different reasons".
Workers can adopt concurrent multiple careers for a variety of reasons, such as: poverty, striving for wealth, multiple degrees in multiple fields, interest or lack of fulfillment in one specific career.
As a result, making career choices and decisions is going through ongoing changes. Therefore, many individuals find it almost impossible to have one career a lifetime. People need to learn to be more and more flexible in their thinking, so that they can revisit this process of career planning more frequently than in the past. In today's world we have to adapt to the notion that most of us will have to learn more skills, beyond the boundaries of a single organization or a work style, and more and more of us will have to take control over our personal development as employees.
In addition, the fact that we live longer than in the past, adds to the expectancy of having a number of careers during our lifetime. More and more people can, and some times have to, work long after retirement. These individuals will have to break away from the security of a steady job, and might pursue a second and third career.
This process is not new to our world. Studies in the United States by the end of the seventies showed that between 10 and 30 percent of the economically active population had experienced at least one career change in a 5-year period. A survey in Germany found that out of 91 skilled young adults, only one third had continuous careers in the first eight years after graduation, and over half were employed in other occupations at least once.
Unfortunately, despite its inevitability, this is almost always a painful and worry-provoking process for many. But for those who are willing to switch gear and take risks, life and career changes can bring along exiting surprises.
Getting Another Chance
Sheila Peters, a professional dancer, was forced to leave the stage at age 46. Since she simultaneously got divorced and had to support her two young children, she needed money, and fast.
So she went into business and found a job as an operational coordinator for a capital firm. Soon enough she had money, but felt miserable. "I felt robbed of my identity", she told Susan Donaldson James of ABC news. "It was excruciatingly painful to sit at a desk eight hours a day. I felt like a caged animal… my whole identity was in creativity and movement. I was doing something alien, not because I wanted to but because I needed to…"
Eventually Peters realized this is the wrong path for her, she went back to college and got a master degree in leadership. Next year she will graduate, and although she is already fifty four years old she believes she is in the right direction. "My dream is to teach executives to use movement for negotiating skills, presentations and stress management", she says. Her chances, so it seems, are pretty good. After all, as Donaldson James pointed out, this time it's her choice.
Diana Vacca (65), who dropped out of college to get married and have children, is another example of forced changes. When Vedca was forty she decided she wanted to go to work and went back to college. When she graduated she started teaching but had to stop in order to take care of her ailing mother. After her mother's death she tried finding another teaching position but to no avail. She went back to school and acquired a degree in journalism. Since she was over sixty nobody wanted to hire her, so now she is writing a series of profiles about women of her generation. "My only regret is that I would love to do investigative journalism"' she told Donaldson James of ABC news, "But I need to build relationships with people over time and I don't have the time".
There are two major ways to look at career changes when they are forced upon us: We can consider it bad luck, mourn this unwanted turn of events and feel miserable. Or we can act like Peters and Vacca, see this as a second, and sometimes third chance to do things we always dreamed of doing, or find entirely new paths we had never knew existed. It doesn't really matter what type of career we choose - if we are able to see it as a new opportunity, we are more likely to experience a new sense of anticipation, excitement, and eventually, success.
<back
by Nina Baruch
At first I was confused. Hadn't I carefully planned my career? How come it wasn't
working for me anymore? Where had I gone wrong?
At this stage I started hearing about second careers, and multiple careers.
Apparently, planning one career a lifetime, in a changing labor world, wasn't
enough anymore. In order to bring back a sense of security into my life, I
needed to learn completely new skills. Instead of sticking with what I knew
and had been doing for years, I had to learn how to let go of the past, give
up old and useless plans and methods, and learn new skills. I had to keep
my mind open and become attuned to a constantly changing world, without
it letting me be shoved aside time and again.
How Did It All Began?
The concept of having a career - one or more a lifetime - developed alongside
the labor market, creating more and more professions and occupations for
workers. This new reality was enhanced by liberal ideas developed during
the 18th and 19th centuries, about the right to choose an occupation, and find
in it not only a source of income but also a sense of fulfillment.
Toward the end of the 20th century, the idea of personal choice and self direction
was aided by the power of the Internet, which increased the acceptance of people
having multiple types of jobs, and the concept of having more than one career
a lifetime.
"The plethora of choices and widespread education made the concept of career
plan very fashionable and popular, and created a new profession - career
counselor and career advisor", says the Wikipedia, the Internet free
encyclopedia. "Since many adults nowadays having dual or multiple careers,
professional identities, which once used to be a lifetime identity, have become
hybridized to reflect this shift in work ethic. These multiple careers can either
be concurrent (where a worker has two simultaneous careers) or sequential
(where a worker adopts a new career after having worked for some time in
another career). Both may occur for different reasons".
Workers can adopt concurrent multiple careers for a variety of reasons, such as: poverty, striving for wealth, multiple degrees in multiple fields, interest or lack of fulfillment in one specific career.
As a result, making career choices and decisions is going through ongoing changes. Therefore, many individuals find it almost impossible to have one career a lifetime. People need to learn to be more and more flexible in their thinking, so that they can revisit this process of career planning more frequently than in the past. In today's world we have to adapt to the notion that most of us will have to learn more skills, beyond the boundaries of a single organization or a work style, and more and more of us will have to take control over our personal development as employees.
In addition, the fact that we live longer than in the past, adds to the expectancy of having a number of careers during our lifetime. More and more people can, and some times have to, work long after retirement. These individuals will have to break away from the security of a steady job, and might pursue a second and third career.
This process is not new to our world. Studies in the United States by the end of the seventies showed that between 10 and 30 percent of the economically active population had experienced at least one career change in a 5-year period. A survey in Germany found that out of 91 skilled young adults, only one third had continuous careers in the first eight years after graduation, and over half were employed in other occupations at least once.
Unfortunately, despite its inevitability, this is almost always a painful and worry-provoking process for many. But for those who are willing to switch gear and take risks, life and career changes can bring along exiting surprises.
Getting Another Chance
Sheila Peters, a professional dancer, was forced to leave the stage at age 46. Since she simultaneously got divorced and had to support her two young children, she needed money, and fast.
So she went into business and found a job as an operational coordinator for a capital firm. Soon enough she had money, but felt miserable. "I felt robbed of my identity", she told Susan Donaldson James of ABC news. "It was excruciatingly painful to sit at a desk eight hours a day. I felt like a caged animal… my whole identity was in creativity and movement. I was doing something alien, not because I wanted to but because I needed to…"
Eventually Peters realized this is the wrong path for her, she went back to college and got a master degree in leadership. Next year she will graduate, and although she is already fifty four years old she believes she is in the right direction. "My dream is to teach executives to use movement for negotiating skills, presentations and stress management", she says. Her chances, so it seems, are pretty good. After all, as Donaldson James pointed out, this time it's her choice.
Diana Vacca (65), who dropped out of college to get married and have children, is another example of forced changes. When Vedca was forty she decided she wanted to go to work and went back to college. When she graduated she started teaching but had to stop in order to take care of her ailing mother. After her mother's death she tried finding another teaching position but to no avail. She went back to school and acquired a degree in journalism. Since she was over sixty nobody wanted to hire her, so now she is writing a series of profiles about women of her generation. "My only regret is that I would love to do investigative journalism"' she told Donaldson James of ABC news, "But I need to build relationships with people over time and I don't have the time".
There are two major ways to look at career changes when they are forced upon us: We can consider it bad luck, mourn this unwanted turn of events and feel miserable. Or we can act like Peters and Vacca, see this as a second, and sometimes third chance to do things we always dreamed of doing, or find entirely new paths we had never knew existed. It doesn't really matter what type of career we choose - if we are able to see it as a new opportunity, we are more likely to experience a new sense of anticipation, excitement, and eventually, success.
<back
