One of the biggest disconnects between high school and the rest of your life is talk on careers. Listening to your high school teachers, you’d be forgiven for believing that a career involved wandering down to IGA and plucking one from the shelves. 

The reality is more like starting out as a check-out chick at IGA, pashing Dave in aisle seven, learning how to do the big cash reconciliations with Joe while you weave elaborate tales about the two of you ripping off the joint. Following that, a sideways step into cereal manufacturing, beef slaughtering and applying stickers to the side of jam jars, a brief, month-long flirtation with Coles before you return to IGA, and then a three party buy-out after you struck up a conversation with a customer in aisle five who liked you.

Only five percent of people pick the job they’ll enjoy and have for life on the first try, according to economist Neil Howe, and these people tend to be less creative and less adventurous so they’re happy taking the conventional path which, ironically, is now the path-less-travelled.

Arts students unite!

I’m an arts student. I have a Bachelors as well as a Masters of Arts, which cost me approximately 40 per cent of my net income over the year-and-a-half course. My return to university at age 27 was fuelled by my frustration that the elusive ‘career’ hadn’t yet materialised.

“This time, I’ll do something that leads directly to a clear career path,” I chanted, delusional. The only thing a Masters of Arts qualifies you for is an oft-repeated story about how I paid 40 per cent of my net income for the privilege (and pleasure) of doing the course.

Hell boss

Eventually, I got career direction from a “challenging” boss, by which I mean she interviewed me three times, had me doing real ‘mock’ work before she hired me, told me in the last interview that she was concerned that I’d leave her to start my own business, put me on probation at a lower rate, and then extended this by two months, had me attend daily “feedback” sessions with my superior, and then fired me on the last day of my extended probation. Blind Freddy saw that coming. 

I’d never tried so hard and failed to get on with someone in my life. And yes, getting on with your boss is absolutely essential if you are to get anywhere in your job. As Penelope Trunk says, your actual job is to help your boss, not tick off tasks on your job description list.

But something she said kept jangling in my head during my first week of unemployment. “She thought I was going to leave and start my own business. She actually thought I could?” I kept muttering to my boyfriend. I asked myself aloud whether I could, had no negative reactions from him and so, a week later, I registered my business name, domain name and hung out my shingle in cyberspace.  

Make it up

Since that day, over five years ago, I have made it up as I’ve gone along. Of course, I’ve drawn on skills developed in my prior jobs in public relations, tour leading and communications, but I’ve also crafted a pretty unique business which has, in the last five years, undergone significant changes.

Not me

For those thinking “not me, no way could I do that”, I ask you to think of my boss. Five months working for her left my confidence pretty shaky. Towards the end, I needed daily pep talks and reassurance that it won’t be this way forever (from myself, boyfriends and friends – I never let on at work). 

I started my business due to stubbornness. She thought I could do it, so I did it. 

Get on with it

The key to having a business is having clients. There’s no getting around that. As a newly minted business person, your urgent necessity is to get one client, and then use that to get another and another and another. Don’t worry about your brand, your logo, your plan or your ideal client profile. That’s a luxury process that comes later, when you can afford it.

For now, you want to be hungry – which is why getting fired or having no other income is actually good for a new business, though it may seem counterintuitive. You need money coming in as quickly as possible. The effects on your self-esteem on receiving your first payments as a new business owner cannot be compared to hours on the therapist’s couch. It’s unbelievably satisfying.

Creative necessity

We are all likely to change jobs and careers numerous times. The young and privileged will pay (or their parents will) for additional education in a field unrelated to their first degree, which may or may not be made back in their new career before they switch again to something different.

We really do our teenagers a disservice expecting them to make decisions about what they want to do with their lives just as they’re emerging from a three-year hole of self-inquiry and self-loathing. What we should be doing is postponing university and launching teenagers straight into work. They should have paid positions at various places where they can observe and experience real-life realities of different jobs in different industries.  

No, a gap year spent exploring Thai whiskey and joints while hanging with a bunch of Daves doesn’t count. 

Whether we want or realise this, we will all have unconventional careers that look wildly different to our grandfather’s careers. So the sooner we get used to thinking creatively, taking risks, acting confidently (sometimes motivated by stubbornness and a hell boss), the better.

Want to know more about Brook?

Brook McCarthy is a writer and marketer and Director of Yoga Reach online marketing consultancy for wellbeing businesses. Brook is also a qualified yoga teacher with a background in public relations and tour leading. You may like to download her free e-Book called ‘Authentic Marketing Manifesto’ for us poor souls who deem ethics and honesty in business as more important that hype-filled self-promotion, while knowing that marketing and selling are also essential to viable business.

I want to thank Brook for her thought-provoking insights into the elusive 'career' of the 21st Century. As a television-and-communications-university-degree-holder and someone who has had SO MANY jobs as a television freelancer, I can completely relate to this.

How do you feel about the traditional career versus the one that we've come to know that includes self employment, online business, multiple careers, and making it up as you go along? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Make sure to share this with your career-wayward friends and see you in the comments below!

Tweet

Posted by Katherine Mackenzie-Smith & filed under General Musing. This post has 6 comments.