Dear Coach:
I watched my Dad clock in long hours at the office. I want a career that’s engaging and that lets me use what I’ve learned in school. But I also want some balance in my life – time for friends and dating and sports. Is that too much to ask?
Want a Life
Dear Want:
First let me acknowledge that you’re not alone. According to What Canadians Think by two of Canada’s leading pollsters, 81% of Canadian students surveyed said having an “interesting” work was important to them. To put that in prospective, only 19% said having a high paying job was important.
I get that engaging work is really, really important to the folks in your generation.
But I should tell you what I’m hearing from the people who are hiring students. They’re saying “Job seekers today want us to guarantee them stimulating work, increasing responsibilities and pet projects before they’ve even proved themselves. New hires have to put in the work to show us what they can do before we’re going to trust them with a major assignment.”
The truth is work, like the rest of life, can’t be interesting every minute. But, if you’re committed to your career and work for a good organization, you’ll find that exciting projects are usually part of the mix.
As a Life Coach, I can’t argue with your desire to have a balanced life. Achieving it can be tricky when you’re in the early years of your career, though. Only you can choose the kind of career that will let you meet the outside-of-work commitments that make life worth living for you.
A lot of people want the status and pay that goes along with a big career. Big careers often take big amounts of time, even if you’re smart and well trained. During the years when you’re laying the foundation for your career, you may have to work longer hours than you want. That doesn’t mean you can’t find time for sports, or friends, but you may have to give more attention to scheduling your priorities.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Personally, in my opinion - in this article carefully collected all the worst cliches and myths on the subject. A couple of interesting points still skips
ReplyDeleteI agree. Find a job in a school or something so you'll have shorter hours. I graduated college 5 years ago and started working to "show what I can do" and got zip. In a large corporation you get lost in the shuffle. Even if you don't and you're doing well, your personal life really does suffer and that's without having a family and kids to take care of. Working 9 hours a day isn't healthy in my opinion. You get home late and are too tired to do anything so you save it for the weekend and end up with too much to do and you feel like the weekend just flies by.
ReplyDeleteI'm very active and like to work out and take care of my self with with healthy home made food and facials and stuff. But honestly how can I when I've been in the office for 9 hours and it takes an hour to get home in traffic. It just isn't worth it. Life is too short to be spending it making some company loads of money (which you usually don't end up seeing). Enjoy yourself and work to live, not the other way around.
... and another thing, a lot of of dumb people work short hours and get paid lots of money. It sometimes just has to do with how good you are at office politics.
ReplyDelete