Career Advice from Mom

In honor of Mother’s Day, I thought I would focus on the career advice that people receive from mothers and other care takers.  I want to share with you some of the career advice that I have been given from my family.

My grandmother did not think about careers. She thought about jobs. My grandmother was a woman that lived through most of the 20^th century having been born right after World War I. She lived through the Great Depression and World War II.  She saw great prosperity in the country, but also great poverty. Her perspective was not as much about what kind of work, but where are the jobs. There was one day in my young adulthood that I was having a conversation about jobs with her. She stated to go to the Post Office. She said that the Post Office had jobs for everyone that wanted a job. Interestingly enough, this conversation was at a time when the United States Post Office was beginning its decline. She could not understand that there would be a time when there would not be jobs for everyone at the Post Office.  I never did apply for a job with the United States Post Office, but that conversation stuck with me forever because her generational view shaped how she viewed employment. For her finding a place with the most jobs was the most important.

 

My mother was a different woman. A baby-boomer, my mother was always concerned about the quality of jobs. She saw some jobs as not being of the same quality as other jobs. My grandmother did not necessarily think about educational requirements of positions. She only thought about the number of positions. My mother on the other hand correlated the quality of the job to the more education that it requires to achieve it. Whereas my grandmother only did limited work outside the home, my mother worked full time for my entire childhood. For my mother, work was in an office and she associated having more education to getting a better job in an office setting. Although she was aware of industries like education and healthcare where the office building is not as important, her frame of reference was business. My mother would learn about a position that required advanced education and assumed that the job was not only good, but that it lead to a stable career. Her concern was not advancement, but rather working in a job that could be maintained until retirement and to do get that kind of job, college education was necessary.

I am now an adult, a parent, and I just happen to be a workforce development professional. My perspective is that of how I see the world from my childhood experiences, including my family and education, to that of my working life. My career in workforce development allows me to view a job and a career as two different things. I think about how a job is part of a career and does that career offer fulfillment? Does the career allow me to have balance between work and my personal life? I am not as concerned about the number of jobs available or the correlation between the educational requirements for the position and the quality of the job. Instead I am more concerned about the fit for my life and how the work fulfills me.  

As you can see in one family, there were 3 perspectives. I am not the only person that has received occupational counseling from my family. Our vision of employment and the difference between a job and a career is based upon how we have viewed the world. Factors such as poverty, prosperity, parental employment, and our exposure to employment to career information determines how we choose careers. As workforce development professionals, we are working with people that have had similar experiences with career advice. It is important that we remember is not about proving our expertise to our job seekers and discrediting past advice that they have received, but rather understanding why their frame of reference is what it is.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers and those that are like mothers to someone. If anyone would like to share the career advice you have received from your mother, leave it below in the comments. ~

Karen Cirincione;

Email: kcirincione@gmail.com

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/karenjcirincione

Twitter @kcirincione