Flipping Careers 1
By ice rivers
- 139 reads
Since I don't know if what I know is what everybody knows, I'm always afraid of being Captain Obvious. My interest in career development has persisted since my days of baseball cards when entire careers were summed up by statistics on the backside of a piece of cardboard.
Here's the deal....if every picture of a person tells a story then the person of whom the picture was taken is much more than a story and more like a collection of stories in a book or a collection of books in a library.
I love libraries. Some libraries are much larger than other libraries therefore some sections in some libraries are larger than some sections in smaller libraries.
I remember being told told by my fifth grade teacher when we visited the tiny library in our school that we could never read all of the books in a library. I was disappointed. I wanted to read them all.
Since you can't read them all, you've got to choose which ones are the most helpful to you, a clue to helpfulness is interest. If you are interested, the books kinda leap into your hands.
Same way with people.
We can't get to know everyone, fascinating as everyone is, so we learn what we can from the ones who become available to us or whom we seek out. One of the great ways of learning a whole hell of a lot in a short amount of time is to find out what a person does for a living.
What we do for a living is what we call a career. A career is a chosen profession or occupation that a person pursues as their livelihood. It is a long-term journey that involves a series of jobs or positions, often leading to upward mobility, skill development, and personal growth. A career can span decades and involves pursuing interests, goals, and aspirations that align with a person's skills, values, and ambitions. Successful careers are built on hard work, dedication, and a commitment to ongoing learning and professional development.
Thus when we learn about a person's career we get a scan of their skills, values, and ambitions as well as their level of commitment to hard work, dedication and personal/professional development.
That's an awful to to take in when we ask "So, whaddya do for a living."
For a long time in Rochester, people usually answered that question not with what but with where as in I work at Kodak or I work at Bausch or I work at Stromberg Carlsen or I work at Xerox.
We didn't know what they did, just where they did whatever they did.
The only people that I knew that did what they did and where they did it were firefighters, cops, baseball players, soldiers and teachers. MY father and uncle Tommy were firefighters. My uncle George was a cop.
I figured I'd be a cop, a firefighter, a soldier, a Yankee or a teacher but I had no idea how anybody became any of those only that they had got there somehow.
I know a lot more now about how people end up getting to where they got. I've made a life long study of the mysterious process. Maybe I'm Captain Obvious but I want to share what I've learned which you probably have learned as well but just not in so many words.
A career at its most basic is a collection of jobs. A job is a title used to describe a series of tasks. A task can be defined as a function. A function requires a combination of effort, skill, concentration, aptitude, persistence and personality to accomplish.
MMMMKKKKAAAYYYYY
So how do we find out what we want to do and compare that to what is possible for us to do on our way to completing our career which is the journey of our livelihood?
How do we demystify?
Let's begin with a FLIP.
Family
Luck
Intelligence
Personality.
Stay tuned for the rest of your story as well as mine and everybody's at least as far as I know based on what I've taken a lifetime to learn.
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Comments
Interesting thoughts. I've
Interesting thoughts. I've always thought of myself as having had a collection of jobs rather than a career, but with the benefit of hindsight I can see it all had a certain pattern in it. I always found it interesting that 'career' means both a professional trajectory and running headlong somewhere with no control. Funny that.
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