I talk about Jobs a lot on this blog—as in, Day Jobs vs. Real Jobs, a Day Job as separate from a job you’re passionate about, a job as a way to establish your credibility, and so on.
What I don’t talk as much about, though, is the idea of a Career, which is something I’ve been overlooking both in my own life and in my philosophy about work in general.
I imagine a Career as a way of defining all the work you’ve done in a way you can be proud of. A Career is something you’d openly tell others about when introducing yourself at a cocktail party, or something you’d write below your name on a business card. A career is a way of defining yourself, and it establishes a kind of identity for you as a working person.
Careers can also (and usually do!) span multiple Jobs. For example, someone with a Career in IT might work at seven or ten companies over the course of that Career in different capacities ranging from intern to manager. Being an intern is really different from being a manager, but they both fit into that idea of a Career.
As such, it then follows that Careers can include jobs that look and feel very different, and don’t always move up a progressive ladder from lower-paying to higher-paying. One example might be an painter who makes and sells their own work, but also teaches art, regularly produces images for a company that makes mugs and travel bags, and gets hired by a city council to paint a big mural on a highway underpass.
All of these Jobs are pretty different, but they all involve art and painting. Together they can make up that artist’s Painting Career.
This goes back to an idea I’ve written about many times: Creative Careers will often look very different from other kinds of Careers in that they’ll involve a lot of zigzags, Job changes, life changes, and likely a lot of freelancing/contract work/entrepreneurship/work where you have to file a Schedule C on your taxes. And that kind of piecemeal process can come together into a Career.
Careers as a Chosen Way of Defining Yourself
I also want to stress that a Career isn’t really a smoke-and-mirrors way of presenting yourself to meet social standards or to fit in: it’s an actual, genuine way of defining the work you do.
In that sense, the Career you make is what makes sense to you.
And in many ways, that makes a Career an incredibly personal thing that we all make ourselves.
In my case, I’m building up a Career as a Writer, which also involves being an Editor and a Teacher. This Career is made up of many pieces: putting out shorter stories and essays, a chapbook, and (next year!) a novel, but also building up a client base for the editing work I do, editing publications I’m proud of, and working as an English teacher in Japan. It’s labyrinthine and complex, but together it makes up a Career.
In my case, I wouldn’t include my previous Day Job writing electronics copy and managing databases as part of my Career, nor would I include my time grading standardized tests or most of the other jobs I worked in my earlier days. Those were just Day Jobs that I worked to get money, experience, or to try to figure out where I wanted to go next.
The Terms We Use to Talk About Our Work Matter
When I started this blog, one of my goals was to standardize the phrase “Day Job” into a useful term for describing work that creative people do to keep the bills paid in ways that didn’t necessarily define them as people. One of my new goals is to better define what it means to have a Creative Career, and how those Careers get made. So, expect some more talk about that moving forward :-)
If this post has resonated with you, you might stop to think about your own Career, whether it’s a Creative Career or another kind of Career. How does the work you’ve done so far contribute (or not contribute) to your Career? How about the work you want to do in the future?
These questions are worth taking some time out of your busy schedule to think about—I know they’ve felt that way for me, and I’m sure they will for you too.