Careering along
I was thinking the other day (always a dangerous thing to do, and should never be done near combustible materials, on account of the heat generated). Are any of us in the job we wanted to be in? I know I’m not. Strange isn’t it? When we are young children, one of the first things you are asked when meeting someone new, what do you want to be when you grow up?
At that age you don’t even know IF you want to grow up, let alone what you want to be (I chose not to grow up - unfortunately not getting old wasn’t an option).
And what does it mean anyway? A five year old will have no idea about what a fireman does, except ride in a fire engine and put out fires. Beyond that there will be no understanding at all.
Even the concept of work is out of our grasp. All we know is mummy and daddy go there, and it does awful things to them, because they come home tired. So why does our education system put such emphasis on knowing what you want to be? Could there be another way of educating that allows those choices to come much later?
Anyway, I digress (regular readers will see a pattern here). When I first started senior school, I wanted to be a rally driver. Apparently, that was considered to be on a par with train driver, and I was encouraged to think of something else. I thought this strange because people did grow up to be train drivers, and even rally drivers, so why wouldn’t that be an option for me? Because it wouldn’t.
Finally, I settled on being a marine biologist. I loved biology, I loved the sea, and I wanted to work with dolphins. What more could I ask for. Well, apparently something a bit more sensible. You won’t ever have a chance to work with dolphins, because, well you just won’t.
It seemed to me the career advisors had their sights set pretty low. In fact, I am not sure they even had their sights set, because the career they decided would be ideal for me was…cartologist! Yes, that’s right, with my interest in biology, sea and mammals, I was clearly cut out to be a map maker. All the way through school I had been taking subjects that would be useful to a marine biologist, and they wanted me to get out the coloured pencils and draw contour lines.
So I left school and became a marine biologist…well actually, no. I became an aircraft radio engineer. See the connection? No, me neither. With that sort of insight, perhaps I should have become a career advisor.
Maybe that’s why the word career can mean:
- an occupation undertaken for a significant period of a person's life and with opportunities for progress.
- move swiftly and in an uncontrolled way in a specified direction.
It all begins to make sense now.
...all makes sense to me, that man:)
ReplyDelete