Career or a Job?

A couple of weeks ago, I ran into a former co-worker that I worked with for about a year.  She and I both had media backgrounds, but were not working in broadcasting at the time we worked together.

The week before, I reached out to a number of my Facebook friends in a “private message” asking them if they would be interested in a career change.  The radio stations I work for are looking for candidates for consideration who would be interested and qualified to work in advertising sales.  You never know who might be quietly looking for a career change.

Which got me to thinking about the whole subject of jobs versus careers and how they fit into our lives.

In America, we are often encouraged to consider a career field or at the very least a good job.

What’s the purpose and what’s the difference?

Ultimately they are provide us with money to buy the things we need.

Or if you are completely self sustainable, to provide the things we need without needing money.  But I doubt that is possible these days.  Even if you live off the land and you own the land, there are likely going to be property taxes.

So we need money and we also need something to do to earn that money in most cases. If we don’t need to earn money then we at least need to fill our waking hours with some type of activity.

Let’s stick to the mainstream American who needs money to pay their monthly bills.  You can go after a career that is characterized as something greater than a simple job, more like an occupation that could involve a series of related jobs.

I’ve had both.

In my teens, I worked in a grocery store, a record store, a couple of restaurants and eventually started my radio career full time when I was 18.

The radio career evolved from working on the air to the advertising side and also included management.  My radio career evolved into a career in marketing/advertising and sales.  These days I’ve combined all of those fields as an advertising account manager for a radio station company that now also includes all kinds of web and internet marketing options too.

But I’ve taken a break a few times or had side jobs along the way.

I worked in a night club as a disc jockey and then video jockey for awhile.  I also was a thermoformer operator for a plastics factory.  These were jobs I took to pay the bills, not because of long term career ambitions.

Sometimes we need to step away from our careers and simply take a job that pays the bills because of higher priorities at the time.  Priorities like family.

I also learned from my recent discussions that there are a lot of people who are unhappy with where they work or what they do.  Often it’s not the money but the working conditions that people don’t like. Yet because they need the money, they’ll put up with a bunch of crap.

Attitude is the key.  Learning about ourselves, our motivations and our aptitudes are probably the most important bits of information to satisfaction in the work world. Because as a friend of mine said a long time ago, no matter what job you take or career path you follow, there is one person that you’ll have to work with everyday. That person is You.