Poll:Did you hold "jobs" or have a "career"?

[devans0]

I worked in a factory as an hourly employee. It was my job. I work on my investing now and it feels like my career, but it's my FI hobby.

 

[dirt_dobber]

career.
Started in the Oil business the day after HS in 1977 and worked for 38 years in that industry until getting the package Oct.2015. Worked with amazing people and very fulfilling.
Now at age 56 - loving being with the grandkids.

 

[Gone4Good]

I definitely had a career. One that took a lot of time, dedication and sacrifice.

I started with very specific career goals and reached them fairly swiftly. At that point I looked up the corporate ladder and saw nothing else of interest. It didn't take long after that point for my career to morph into a job. Several years later I was Gone4Good.

 

[brett]

Got into IT by chance. Had 32 fabulous years. It was a career and for the most part I loved every day of it until the last few years. It was also very rewarding and very lucrative. The time passed so quickly. I consider myself to be extremely fortunate to have been on this path.

Glad to be out doing what I want to do now...mostly travel.

 

[kcowan]

I have a Masters degree in Process Engineering. Spent my whole career applying what I learned then and subsequently. 22 different job titles. One career.

 

[2017ish]

I voted Other.

Like OP, blue collar with no other family going to college. Ended up in law school after worthless college majors and managed to win the academic race--> big law litigator with the expected no family, 7 day weeks. Clearly "career" at that point. But, eventually opted out of partnership consideration and quit to stay home with kids because DW also has all-encompassing job. Happened into a half-time law faculty job that I could balance with home rehabbing, volunteering, and being SAHP/cook etc.

15 years later, after following DW to a new state, resumed commercial litigation with the concomitant 12 hour M-F, and lesser S/Sun hours. Again, looks like a career--but told firm up front I was not interested in partnership because of early retirement plans. Am REing after less than 10 years in 11-17 months (depending when DW's replacement arrives....)

Compared to DW's med career, my path has been "jobs," but most objective observers would probably quibble with that.

 

[Danmar]

Definitely career. I decided around age 20 what career I wanted, being professional accountant. At the time (early '70's) this was a good way for someone to make a good salary. Up till that point I was basically working in a factory. I went back to school part time, got an undergrad degree, being the first person in our extended family to go to university. My parents actually discouraged me from this. At age 25 got a job at a big accounting firm. Was amazed at the difference between the professionalism at the accounting firm and the envireonment at the factory. I really was impressed. Kept going to school part time and got an MBA. Eventually left accounting firm for big bank and wound up as senior exec.

Wouldn't have been able to do this without "becoming the job" but this was a deal that was worth it from my perspective. Really enjoyed the work and must have been pretty good at it. Eventually it got a little stale and by my mid '50's I was ready to retire. Definitely it was a career.

 

[scrabbler1]

I chose career.


After I graduated college at age 22, I worked at the same company for 23 years, the first 16 full-time and the last 7 part-time. In those 16 FT years, I got promoted 4 times, the third one to a supervisory level for the first time. I also changed divisions once after 4 years which also greatly helped me move upward. After my last promotion, it seemed more like a job than a career at times because I knew that would be my last one. But the raises were still pretty good and in my 7 PT years the company began giving out sizable bonuses.


I ERed 7 years ago and don't miss it at all, especially the dang commute.

 

[Tallman4123]

I voted career but I'd have to say jobs for my first decade of w*rk. Besides supporting my young family, I used those first ten years or so to fund my advanced education, earning bachelor and master degrees at night school during that first decade. Now, a career approaching three decades. The degrees opened a few doors that would have otherwise been closed, but most of the career advancement was based on luck; randomly being in the right place at the right time.

Ironically for me, now that FI is in sight (2 1/2 years), I think of my w*rk as a job again; simply a means to an end. That outlook also has something to do with the fact that I'm satisfied with my current position and have no desire to continue my "career development".

 

[photoguy]

I had a career but somewhere during the middle I realized I didn't want to move up anymore and I wanted to get out. Then it was a job.

 

[DrRoy]

I worked for the same Megacorp for 32 years, then the business that I was in was sold off in 2013. I still work in that business now, and will RE in about a year. In the 35 years I had positions in different functions (mfg, marketing, sales, technical support of customers) in two different businesses, in 7 locations, but I consider it a career.

 

[mf15]

Wanted to be a chemist since I got my first Gilbert Chemistry Set, before I could read. I am guessing 1953 or so.
Retired from my small/midcrop private company in 08 after 31 years, they were bought by an investment group. They brought me back as an independent contractor 2010 that was a job.
Now they retired my butt again, back in December. Too bad, kept me sharp, and enjoyed seeing friends, also did not have to deal with management crap.

Old Mike

 

[Walt34]

Aspects of both at times but overall I'd say career. Law enforcement was what I wanted to do and although parts were certainly boring I found the people aspects fascinating, as in why do otherwise apparently intelligent people do such stupid things? I was a patrol officer for 18 years and learned there is a way to start or stop a riot with a few well-chosen words. Well, a small riot anyway, a big one takes some teamwork but it can be done. I didn't start one but I saw another guy do it, just amazing to watch. I learned about criminal investigation, evidence handling, lots of other interesting stuff. (Forget anything you see on CSI - almost all of it is pure fiction.) And a lot of traffic accident investigations, now a specialty unto itself for the more serious ones.

Then I did fraud investigation, theft by scheme, forgery, embezzlement, and the like. (I handled a case where the same house was sold three times in one day. I mean it went to settlement three times!) That morphed into computer crime investigations because I liked working those cases and nobody else wanted them because they didn't know how to handle them. In turn that morphed into computer forensics at a time when there were five people in the state of MD doing that kind of work, including at the federal level. We all knew each other's first names. Aside from being a way-cool job straight out of a science fiction book I read in high school, another inspiration was that a woman in PA died a very horrible protracted death because the police in a small town did not recognize a home computer as a possible source of evidence. Understandable then (~1990) and I didn't want to see that happening where I worked, and at the time it was a very real possibility. We made many trips to various stations to educate the officers about the unit and what we could do for them in their cases.

The legal issues were fascinating too. Often there was no precedent on search & seizure issues because computers were new and no situation like that had ever come up before. It didn't help that early lower court decisions were all over the map on some things so there was no consistency.

So although I worked for the same agency for 29 years I did a lot of different jobs.

 

[Scarecrow]

B.S. in Computer Science, over 30 years in IT, I guess most would call that a career. But it sure felt like a job. The technical work was often interesting/enjoyable. But difficult coworkers and clueless mgmt can ruin everything.

 

[marko]

All within the same large tech company: started as a better-than-nothing job, then a career, then an obsession, then my life. Climbed from $3/hr technician to EVP and director of the company in just under 30 years.

I was known as "Mr. (company name)".

Loved every single day of it, but the company itself made whatever sacrifices required very worthwhile. (I know...the place was not the norm)

 

[RetireAge50]

Definitely just a job. If someone asks what I do I say janitor or brain surgeon. The last thing I want to do is talk about work.

 

[razztazz]

What I did for a living is almost universally considered a "career" by most people's definition or conception. Even the people I worked for. I considered it a job.

 

[swakyaby]

I'd call what I do a career, in part because it was such a long pathway to get there. It took 4 years of additional post-college education, 4 more years of specialized training, and still requires mandatory continuing medical education to maintain licensure to practice medicine. I may have changed medical groups along the way, but it's still the same occupation.

 

[Options]

Anyone younger than the age of 50 should understand that having a "career" in a traditional sense is becoming less and less a reality due to the rapid increase in technology.

This change was covered well here:

http://www.psmag.com/business-economics/the-future-of-work-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-job

Since 2000, rising American productivity has become de-coupled from job growth: Despite sizzling profits and the ever-receding horizon of a brighter future for all—just on the other side of endless “disruption”—the celebrity industries of Silicon Valley and Wall Street are hollowing out middle-class jobs. When anything at all is filling the void, too often it is the cruelly misnamed sharing economy or hourly work for minimum wage, both greased with record levels of household debt.

After a century of insisting that the secure, benefits-laden job was the frictionless meritocratic means of rewarding society’s truly valuable work and workers, today we find that half the remaining jobs are in danger of being automated out of existence. Of the 10 fastest-growing job categories, eight require less than a college degree. Over 40 percent of college graduates are working in low-wage jobs, and it isn’t in order to launch their start-up from the garage after the swing shift at Starbucks

And most recently in this Citi/Oxford report "Technology at Work v2.0 The Future Is Not What It Used to Be":

http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/reports/Citi_GPS_Technology_Work_2.pdf

In our February 2015 Citi GPS report Technology At Work we cited three primary
reasons why we believed the impact of technology change on the economy was
different this time: (1) the pace of change has accelerated; (2) the scope of
technological change is increasing; and (3) unlike innovation in the past, the
benefits of technological change are not being widely shared — real median wages
have fallen behind growth in productivity and inequality has increased. In the report
that follows, Citi again teams up with Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne from
the Oxford Martin School to answer a number of the questions that were generated
post the original report – on a range of topics from susceptibility to solutions.
There seems little doubt that the pace of technology change has accelerated.
Whereas it took on average 119 years for the spindle to diffuse outside of Europe,
the Internet spread across the globe in only 7 years. Going forward, as argued in
the Citi GPS Disruptive Innovations III report, the cost of innovation continues to fall
as cheaper smartphones will help bring 4 billion more people online. The next stage
of connectivity will move from people to 'things' with Cisco estimating 500 billion
devices will be connected by 2030, up from 13 billion in 2013. Increasing digital
connectivity is fuelling a data boom, with data volume estimated to be doubling
every 18 months, and computers are likely far better able to handle this volume than
people

Emphasis added

Also see this outstanding book for an idea of what to expect as a result of rapidly expanding/changing technology:

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee | | 9780393239355 | Hardcover | Barnes & Noble


Increasingly, with only 10-20% of workers having careers (mostly the managerial class, with some exceptions), the entire idea of "human capital" as a part of one's personal PF must undergo reconsideration and be considered strictly in ROI terms. This would include: (a) education to pursue; (b) educational institution and corresponding costs/expected payback; (c) job offer negotiations; and (d) managing one's work from a sales and marketing viewpoint (i.e., resume used strictly as a marketing tool/interviews viewed strictly as sales calls/deals to be "closed"). No job offers are accepted without a higher counteroffer, and loyalty to employers is always secondary to one's own financial security and advancement.

I believe it was Michael Kitces who stated human capital is the most important part of one's overall lifetime PF. In light of current and future accelerated technological changes, it would be advisable for anyone under 50 to manage their work life as strategically, if not more so, than their PF.

 

[CaliforniaMan]

Anyone younger than the age of 50 should understand that having a "career" in a traditional sense is becoming less and less a reality due to the rapid increase in technology.

This change was covered well here:

http://www.psmag.com/business-economics/the-future-of-work-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-job



And most recently in this Citi/Oxford report "Technology at Work v2.0 The Future Is Not What It Used to Be":

http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/reports/Citi_GPS_Technology_Work_2.pdf



Emphasis added

Also see this outstanding book for an idea of what to expect as a result of rapidly expanding/changing technology:

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee | | 9780393239355 | Hardcover | Barnes & Noble


Increasingly, with only 10-20% of workers having careers (mostly the managerial class, with some exceptions), the entire idea of "human capital" as a part of one's personal PF must undergo reconsideration and be considered strictly in ROI terms. This would include: (a) education to pursue; (b) educational institution and corresponding costs/expected payback; (c) job offer negotiations; and (d) managing one's work from a sales and marketing viewpoint (i.e., resume used strictly as a marketing tool/interviews viewed strictly as sales calls/deals to be "closed"). No job offers are accepted without a higher counteroffer, and loyalty to employers is always secondary to one's own financial security and advancement.

I believe it was Michael Kitces who stated human capital is the most important part of one's overall lifetime PF. In light of current and future accelerated technological changes, it would be advisable for anyone under 50 to manage their work life as strategically, if not more so, than their PF.

Thanks for your post and the excellent links. Just going through them now.

On the vote, I voted job. Always thought of a "career" as some well defined path from here to there, and for me my life has been anything but. Never thought I would end up where I did, from where I started.

In fact years ago, at some family get together someone my age (I was young then) talked about our "careers." Wow, that term had never even entered my thought process. I was just working, doing this, doing that, starting my own business, working. What the heck was a career? I just thought it was a funny word and except for maybe a lawyer, professional athlete or professional management type, didn't describe real life at all.

 

[kcowan]

On the vote, I voted job. Always thought of a "career" as some well defined path from here to there, and for me my life has been anything but. Never thought I would end up where I did, from where I started...

I voted career because I always used my career skills in every job I had. Maybe it is just semantics but I would feel sorry for someone who just did the job without applying their skills and knowledge to improvement of the process.

 

[jollystomper]

I voted career. Always in IT, always in Megacorp and regardless of my title or the technology area it always boiled down to "We have is a problem. Can you solve it?" - and I have enjoyed that aspect of my career.