What is a Career Anyway?

I was reading the latest edition of Work in Progress, where Al tries to explain how much the idea of a career isn’t what it once was, but I’m going to disagree with this bit a little:

For many Boomers, Gen X’ers, and Millennials, the playbook for choosing a career was to go to college, get a degree, and choose a job that you could get, and then over time, it could turn into a career until you retire. While there are variations of this, this was a generally accepted norm. Basically, in college, you decide what you are going to be, and then you grow and build a career in that for the rest of your life.

I do agree that was the playbook we were taught, but I’m not at all convinced that this has been the reality for many of us. Probably most of us don’t have a career that matches that description either.

I’m solidly GenX. Since leaving college I’ve worked for 12 different organizations and had 17 different jobs thanks to internal job moves as well. (I’m currently looking for the next one too.) Since 2007, I’ve worked in an industry, eDiscovery, that didn’t exist when I was in college.

The idea that I would leave college knowing what I wanted to do, find a company to dedicate myself to, and spend my adulthood doing that thing is a joke to me. It’s been an unrealistic expectation for a long time. GenZ is just the first generation where we stopped even trying to convince them of it because it’s become too obvious.

As Al goes on to detail, change happens too fast and your career needs to change along with it. Your career is very likely to be non-linear, and it needs to be self-driven. That’s just the reality of work now. It puts more responsibility in our own hands, a responsibility that has truly been in our hands for a long time. It also creates a lot of opportunity when we accept that there is likely no ladder to climb.

How will we take advantage of those opportunities?

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