Career – what’s in a word?
With the language around career planning changing all the time, words like “future”, “pathways” and with the drive to identify “skills” – the word “career” has been displaced and neglected. The legacy of the 80s and 90s gave us the sense that a career identified professional level jobs that some young people felt were too aspirational, or worse, that a career was a sensible, insipid social concept – at odds with a generation wanting to craft a life for themselves, the very antithesis of freedom and individualism.
Words go in and out of fashion and have a life of their own, but their meaning is sometimes worth exploring. The word “career” – comes from the Latin “carra” based on an old Celtic word to describe a two wheeled chariot – and led to the meaning of travelling at speed. It suggests movement, momentum, to go on a journey, challenge and conquer. Think of the verb – to career at something – a term used to describe the trajectory of combat.
Modern definitions of careers tend to place emphasis on the story of someone’s professional roles, often neglecting their wider social, personal and creative story. If we want young people to care about it, and we do, because we care about them creating a life for themselves, then we should help them to grapple with the word. A good introduction to the concept of careers with learners is to look at some definitions (The CDI has a good one*) and ask questions such as the following:
If a novelist is only published after their death, were they an author?
In the end perhaps it’s still helpful to think about the story of the long haired celts, charging towards the Roman lines. To career at anything, suggests risk and intent – qualities not so very different as those required for young people to arm themselves, face down and fling themselves into the Labour Market – and may go some way to explain their natural trepidation in having to advance into their careers.
So, let’s have a go at our own definition, based on the history of the word and see if we can add to the rich meaning surrounding it:
A career is an individuals’ acceleration forward in time, on a course not always predictable, requiring agency and skill, understanding and courage, with the goal of making an impact, finding authenticity, happiness and perhaps even achieving glory.
*A career refers primarily to the sequence and variety of work roles, paid or unpaid, that individuals undertake throughout their lives; but it is also the construct which enables individuals to make sense of valued work opportunities and how their work roles relate to their wider life roles.
Jenny Longstaffe – Career Mark Champion