years of delivering the counselling service in A&E, Donna determined to widen both her knowledge (she studied for and achieved a master's in Integrated Psychotherapy) and the counselling service she was providing.
She presented the executive team and hospital board with a business plan to make a counselling, psychotherapy, and training service available as an ‘in‐house’ provision to all Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust's 9,000 staff.
Donna is now the lead psychotherapist with a team of therapists – delivering the Trust's Health, Employee, Learning and Psychotherapy service. She also became part of the senior HR team and leads on advising the Trust on psychological care for staff.
So, while some people may stay with the same organization, and move up the career ladder in the conventional way, some, like Donna, stay with the same organization but move into a very different role.
Then there are other people who can't or don't want to rely on one organization to provide the structure and opportunities around which they can develop a career. Instead, they move to a different employer every few years in order to progress. In fact, according to recent research by life insurance firm LV=, on average, a UK worker will change employer every five years.
Increasingly, people change professions completely. One person I know has gone from being a plumber in his 20s to becoming a fire officer in the Fire and Rescue Service in his 30s. One friend went from working in book design for 30 years to working as a tree surgeon. Another friend changed direction from being an illustrator to becoming a portrait painter. Someone else I know went from working in hospitality to working in social media. And one friend, who I met when we were both waitressing as teenagers, many years ago, went on to be a pop star, then a TV producer and an investigative journalist, and is now a furniture maker.
Writing in the Financial Times in September 2017, Work and Careers Editor Helen Barrett described having recently met a woman in her fifties who was soon to qualify as a lawyer, her fourth career.
Helen explained that for this woman, an early academic career had led to museum work, and, by her thirties, she was curating exhibitions at leading international galleries in London and Berlin. ‘In her forties,’ Helen wrote, ‘she developed a sideline: teaching the practicalities of entrepreneurship to art undergraduates. This turned into a fascination with intellectual property law. At 46, she started legal training. Years later, she is now a trainee for a boutique intellectual property law firm in the City of London. In another year or so she will be qualified. Would it be her last career? She couldn't say.’
Some people spend their working life with one employer, others change employers and change professions every few years. Many people eschew being employed by someone else and set up their own business, work freelance, and are self‐employed. And some people have more than one career at the same time – a portfolio career: a portfolio of jobs which involves dividing their time and skills between two or more part‐time jobs, one or more of which may be self‐employed.
Clearly, then, career paths are far less predictable than they once were. There's been a huge shift from individuals relying on their employer for job security and career development to individuals taking responsibility for their own career management and employability.
Over a person's lifetime, their own personal circumstances – their values, skills, abilities, and interests – change. There are continual economic and technological changes at local, national, and global level; economies collapse, companies go under, entire professions get automated by technology. And pandemics occur. All of which impact on each and every one of us in terms of jobs, work, and a career.
In good times and bad, whether life appears to be stable and secure or uncertain and unclear, we must manage our own work and career and create our own opportunities. We each need to be open to new ways of thinking and doing and be willing to acquire new knowledge and skills.
Career progress or ‘success’ is no longer measured by how far up an organization's hierarchy a person can climb. Career success and progress is now more subjective: a ‘good job’, ‘good work’, and a ‘successful career’ is defined by you, the individual; it's work that is consistent with your own personal values, circumstances, and priorities at any one period of your life.
What career success means is down to you; you can have your own definition of success and use this definition to guide you in your career choices.
Rather than see a career as a ladder to be climbed, it's more appropriate and helpful to liken a career to a road trip. In the past, a career was like getting on a bus or a train; there was a clearly defined route with stop‐off points and a clear destination. Now, the direction and progress in a career is more within your control and your responsibility. As with any road trip, you control your departure and arrival time, the directions, the itinerary, and stops along the way. Delays – road works, bad weather, diversions, breakdown, or accidents – have to be taken into account and managed. You may have a plan – a map – but you don't have to follow it. You might come across something of interest and take a break to have a look. You could find something of interest you'd like to spend longer at or spot something in the distance that prompts you to take a new direction. You are the one in the driving seat!
Is it Possible to Find Work and a Career that You Enjoy and Are Happy With?
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
Annie Dillard
For many of us, work fills a large part of our lives; the average person spends a quarter of their adult life at work; it's reckoned that we will spend 3,507 days at work over a lifetime.
In her book How to have a Happy Hustle Bec Evans writes: ‘At school when asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I replied that I wanted to be happy. Not a helpful response for my teacher who was trying to organise my Year 10 work placement.’
Is it realistic to think that you can find work and a career that you enjoy and are happy with? To answer this, it helps to understand what makes for happiness and fulfilment. Over 2,000 years ago, the Greek philosopher Aristotle identified two types of happiness: hedonic happiness and eudaimonic happiness. Hedonic happiness is the small pleasures and eudaimonic happiness refers to happiness that comes from having meaning, purpose, and fulfilment in our lives.
Aristotle suggested that because, as human beings, we have a unique ability think, to rationalize and reason, to make judgements, and come to conclusions, we should – indeed we must – use this ability to work out for ourselves ways to live our lives so that we have a sense of purpose and meaning and that we experience a general, stable sense of well‐being, feel fulfilled and believe that, overall, life is good.
Aristotle acknowledged that, of course, happiness can be affected by external issues – our environment, our health, the actions of other people, etc. – but, he said, by using our ability to think and reason, we are able to create a life for ourselves that enables us to bear the ups and downs with balance and perspective and maintain a general sense of well‐being.
Fast forward 2,000 years and, like Aristotle, today's psychologists and researchers are also interested in what makes for happiness and a good life. Positive Psychology Professor, Martin Seligman, for example, in his book Flourish, also suggests that in order to be happy, as well as small pleasures, connecting with others, and feeling that we belong, we need to have one or more things in our life that mean something and make sense to us, that interest and absorb us, that we want to be involved in and allow us to feel good when we achieve what we set out to do.
Of course, what is meaningful, engaging, and gives a sense of purpose is different for everyone. But for so many
