The Career Cake
You may be wondering what a satisfying good career is? There are countless testing and counseling sessions available to help you determine just that. However, careers are like a three layered cake with a lot of frosting: 1- Professionals 2- Blue Collar 3- Minimum Wage Workers.
Professionals – White Collar Jobs
Professionals are the absolutely happiest with their careers. These are the jobs that take many years of training like teacher, doctor, pharmacist, scientist, and engineer.
In these careers, you are hired for your knowledge. People generally respect you. You have some control and say over the work environment and even the work load.
Professionals are usually self motivated and will show up and work well with little supervision. This makes sense because you are not going to spend years training for something, if you do not have sufficient motivation.
There are not enough professional jobs to go around. Access to these jobs is very competitive. However, once entrenched job stability is pretty good because of the high level of job specific knowledge highly skilled workers get.
Mid Level and Blue Collar Careers
You might have some basic on the job training or have even gone to college for four years. You might be working as a mechanic, truck driver, policeman, firefighter, or secretary.
The important point is that people in these careers are no as happy as professionals. Is it just the money? No!! It’s really about having some control, respect, and say in what goes on.
Mid level managers know that the ultimate say goes to the boss above them. Mechanics must report to the shop foreman and secretaries must do what the job says. This gives the employees less control over workload and less control over how they perform the job. A troublesome boss might yell at his secretary for a missed appointment and a truck driver may need some time at home and not get it. There’s a trade off. You got less training and now you’ll have less control.
Manual Laborers and Other Minimum Wagers
Any job is better than no job. However, manual laborers are the least happy of all. They are prone to depression, family problems, and burn out. There are so many jobs at the minimum wage level that they are never completely filled. These are the jobs you try to get out of as soon as possible.
The reason for the insanity is that there is no control over anything. Management has a goal to drive you as quickly as possible to get a profit. Management assigns you all the least desirable tasks and rides you the hardest. Since you are easily replaceable (a commodity) you have no room to negotiate or complain. If you do complain, you can easily lose your job to the next beggar on the street.
It’s possible to be happy doing these jobs; don’t get me wrong. All I am saying is that there is a direct correlation with depression and other occupational problems that occur in much greater numbers for manual laborers. The joy goes to the highly paid professionals.
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