A job to tolerate

Do you have to enjoy your job to be good at it? If you don't enjoy your job, should you leave? Are good pay and comfortable work conditions reason enough to stay?

Your answer to those questions might depend on your generation. Or perhaps on how recently or how long you have been unemployed. Or on how miserable you are in your job.

I met with a small group of career-explorers last week to listen as a technical writer described his work. In addition to explaining his duties and the path that had led to his somewhat accidental career choice, our speaker gave us food for thought when he declared: "There's no joy in technical writing. No one goes home filled with joy over having written the perfect software instruction."

Clipart.com

To place this comment in context, the speaker wasn't complaining about his job. Far from it, in fact. As he noted, it pays well, offers him a comfortable work setting and provides several weeks of vacation per year. He did admit to being a bit bored and noted that he might need to change something to alleviate that problem.

After the speaker left, I asked the group if they thought they would like to be technical writers, despite the lack of "joy" noted by our speaker. As you might expect, the answers were personal and depended somewhat on each person's work experiences and expectations.

One fellow got a laugh when he said: "I hate my job now. Why shouldn't I get paid more to hate it?"

When I stated my belief that jobseekers sometimes place too much emphasis on finding work they love or on searching for "passion" in their jobs, a twentysomething participant said: "But that's the story my generation has been sold. We've been told to look for work we're passionate about."

Oops. Have I been part of that fiasco?

Here's the truth of the matter: Just as there is no one career, job or education to fit every person, there is no one-size-fits-all motivation for working. Where would you even begin to standardize a formula for this? Job Enjoyment = Money x Comfort squared? (Sorry, Dr. Einstein.)

Each person will have different reasons for working, and those reasons will change at different times in that person's life. From my point of view, the last thing a twentysomething worker needs to be burdened with is finding a job to be passionate about. For one thing, it's pretty hard to identify and then land the ideal job when you don't even know yet what you can or want to do in the work world. That kind of self-knowledge comes from experience, not self-analysis.

WORKING STRATEGIES

Amy Lindgren

Career counselors (and columnists and parents) should resist pressing midcareer values on new-career workers. At midcareer it's not only legitimate but also essential to weed through one's experience to toss out things you don't want to do anymore. At age 20 or 25, it's a disastrous strategy.

Rather than encourage young adults to find the work they love, it might be better to help them love the work they find. This means having appropriate work expectations and pushing themselves to do well, regardless of the job.

For example, the first five to 10 years in the work force are ideal for assimilating concepts such as teamwork and customer service while applying the communication and technology skills learned in school.

But shouldn't they be building their careers? To be frank, most people in their 20s don't have careers. Yet. They may be on the path to building the focused expertise and experience usually associated with having a career, but at this stage there isn't likely to be much there to protect. Hence, a better emphasis would be to accumulate work experiences, from any source.

Here's another way to look at it: If current lifespan projections materialize and today's twentysomethings live to 100 or beyond, they may have the longest work period of any generation in U.S. history. They may spend between 40 and 70 years in the work force. That should allow plenty of opportunity to find -- and lose -- a passion for work several times over.

So how's this for career advice? Go ahead and take that next job, whatever your age. Learn all that you can, build friendships and keep your resume updated.

And, for heaven's sake, put away a few dollars every day. If you're going to live to 100, compound interest will turn out to be more important in your life than almost any other business advice your elders give you.

- Amy Lindgren owns Prototype Career Service, a career consulting firm in St. Paul, Minn. She can be reached at alindgren@prototypecareerservice.com or at 1071 W. Seventh St., St. Paul, MN 55102.