First of all, what the heck is a dream job? Does such a concept even really exist?
On March 4, 2009, Time published an article called Finding a Dream Job: A Little Chaos Theory Helps. What the article is really talking about is the element of risk or chaos in choosing a college degree these days. It used to be that a business or law degree was pretty much a guarantee of a good job and an English degree (which I have, by the way), wasn’t going to get you anywhere in this life, at least not in terms of a real job.
So back to chaos theory and your choice of a college degree.
In You Majored in What?: Mapping Your Path From Chaos to Career, Katharine Brooks, Ed.D., points out that the way we usually approach career-planning is logical and linear — i.e., “I majored in political science, so I’ll go to law school,” or “I studied history, so I’ll be a history teacher.” With the economy in shambles, though, what seems straightforward to students (or their parents) may not be. Searching out other less obvious options, always a smart strategy, matters more now than ever. Brooks borrows from mathematical chaos theory to help new grads map out a career plan that will ultimately get them where they really want to go.
The article goes on to say the same thing I’ve been hearing for probably the past 15 to 20 years or so of my work life, which I guess is much of it, that in the old days you expected to get a job with a good company and then stay there for 30 years and retire. So neat and clean. Those were really the old days, though, because I’m a baby boomer and I’ve changed careers about 3 times or so (if you count all the little jobs I took when I couldn’t find something in a chosen field). To the author’s credit, she follows up this line of thinking with “How quaint! Those days are never coming back.” Indeed.
Katharine Brooks has been studying the relationship between college degrees and actual careers for the past couple of decades. She has counseled many a “panicky” graduate that their careers may have little or nothing to do with what they learned in college and she’s created tools to help people make sense of where they’re strengths and interests lie. She says (and I so resonate with this),
“The saddest thing to me is seeing someone take a job just because it pays well, and then spend all that money on toys to cheer them up for being miserable in their job. People who are doing what they love hardly feel they’re working at all, just living.”
So, take heart in this age of no guarantees. Our dream jobs are out there. If you’re reading this, please comment with your own ideas about what your dream job is and if you’ve made it or not. Or write about what you went to college for and what you’re doing now. I’ll tell my own story in my next post.
