The world has changed, and it continues to change. As long as it revolves on its axis it will change and we, the human race, must change along with it. So the fact that the career world has changed should be of no surprise. We expect a 14-year-old to choose what they want to study as they progress through their education. We narrow their field of vision assuming they have a chosen career in mind. But how many of those 14-year-olds become what they aspired to? How many became surgeons, or lawyers, its no different to asking a five-year-old what they want to be when they grow up. When do they learn that being an astronaut or a postman actually isn't for them? We impress on our youngsters, from an early age, that it is all about what you want to be and not who you want to become. The ideal of a job for life is not the same anymore - the authors of the "Squiggly Career" (Tupper & Ellis) have shown us that. There are very few professions that you enter in your twenties and expect to be doing until you retire in your seventies. The millennials and those that have followed have seen the rise of the short-lived celebrities, of the passing of technologies - their future is fast-paced. Why do we not assume that their careers will be to. In fact, is career even the right choice of word anymore?
I could ponder on just this for a whole post but I want to talk about this "crisis" we are seeing in the job world. Is it a crisis in the fields of education and nursing OR is it that people are still finding the right fitting shoe. Is it that people want more, people are not so concentrated on their immediate community but on setting the world alight. Is it that the importance of professions is no longer a thing? Teachers are just teachers and nurses just nurses. They are not lawyers or doctors. Yes, we were needed during Covid, in fact we were frontline workers, but now we have just slipped off the radar again, crept back into the holes from which we came - fearing to raise our heads. Until we are called on again. Is that why there is a crisis I wonder? Is it that we are not seen as important enough?
Yes, it could be the money, but I don't think that it is. The only other place I see that people enter a job for life is the emergency services and the military. Maybe we should look to these to see what they offer that the world of teaching and nursing do not. Firefighters tend to remain in their jobs for life, maybe not so much the Paramedics or Police anymore, but why is that? Doctors don't do all that training to up and leave - unless there is something extremely wrong. Soldiers and Military Personnel join their chosen field and tend to remain in that career - what do they have that we don't? Is it the kind of person that chooses those careers OR is it what they offer? The fact that you do not need a degree to join, they offer training on the job (paid for), they offer other benefits, a community.
We should be looking at the job-world and the technological world, we need to see careers through the eyes of our children and not looking back and asking those that are already long in the tooth. Why don't you want to become a nurse, what is it about teaching that makes you think that you don't want to do it? I have an inkling, but that is for another day, another post, maybe.
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