An unfortunate piece of legacy wisdom regarding career development suggests that it is very important that a young adult make their just-out-of-school career choice extremely carefully or else they may inflict irreparable harm to their future. Imagine feeling that such a weighty life/work decision, like what to do for the rest of your life, needs to be made by someone who has no significant employment experience. Talk about pressure!
Aside from quick thinking action-adventure movie heroes with lightening quick reflexes, most of us, particularly those just beginning adulthood, do not make the most high quality decisions under extreme stress. For big life decisions, like determining a career direction, there needs to be time and guidance to assess options, weigh benefits and risks, and in short, apply a rational process that results in a decision, which hopefully leads to success. The reality is we are transitioning from a world in which career choice was a onetime monumental decision to a world in which career is now comprised of iterations that are unified by a multi-faceted and dynamic theme.
I am from the much-ballyhooed Baby Boomer generation. Among the unique traits that we possess is that we are probably the last generation in which large numbers of us will have worked our entire careers in one job or industry, perhaps even with just one single employer. Boomers have gone from hip to dinosaurs in thirty quick years.
Well, so it goes. But among the rapidly outdated notions we still possess and which we should be increasingly hesitant to pass along to young people is the one professing this up-and-coming cohort should approach career decision making the way we did. Not only is the pressure non-productive and unhelpful, but unnecessary.
Initial career steps are more like speed boats in a relay race, not slow-moving ocean liners. Careers, like life itself, are fluid, changeable, and developmental. We progress and we grow. Choosing a career at the onset of your working years is essentially choosing an uncharted journey, one in which the routes are yet to be planned and the ultimate destination is unclear.
Now, that is not to say that there are not some major decisions in life that have some relative permanency. Marriage, parenting, vocations of high dedication, like for example becoming a priest, are commitments which also see growth and change, but within well-defined parameters. A career is not this. Its structure over time is much more set by you, as opposed to for you by tradition or antiquated rules. You are completely in charge of this piece of your destiny.
This is the message Boomer parents and grandparents should be getting out to young people. It starts with asking children and adolescents if what they are thinking, feeling, and how they are behaving is working for them. And as they approach their robust individuation years, helping them to see how the person they are becoming can best interact with the big wide world.
We are all better off knowing viscerally that we will always be building on what was built by ourselves at an earlier time. Also, a helpful message and attitude is that there really is no sharp distinction between life and career. We don’t dive into one to escape from the other. What we do is who we are.
So, let us adjust the way we prepare youth for career decision making. Let us make the point that what is most important is adaptability, experimenting, and continuous learning, not how expert one is at predicting what will make them happy for the rest of their lives. Helping to prepare our young people for the world to come, rather than the world being left behind, is a valuable gift to leave the next generation.
