Library blog

Job vs. Career: Making the Most Out of Employment

by Karen Jury on 2021-11-19T16:09:00-05:00 | 0 Comments

November is National Career Development Month. But before we talk about what “career development” might mean, we’re going to look at the meanings of “job” and “career.” Some people might use these two words interchangeably. If someone asks you what your “job” is, or if someone asks what “career” are you in, you might give the same answer to both questions. However, although the two words are related, most professionals who assist people with finding jobs or careers would make a distinction. I asked our “career” expert, Steve Hassinger, Dean of Career Services and Development, how he would define and differentiate between the terms “job” and “career.”

According to Steve:
“When most people think of a job, they think of a means of earning money to support your basic needs. A job can be part-time or full-time, temporary or permanent. In general, a job tends to be something you do for the short term.

A career is a more long-term, professional journey that may be made up of many jobs. Typically, those jobs require training and/or education. Having a career that one enjoys often leads to personal and professional satisfaction and self-worth.”

My current employment as a librarian (which I consider as my career) is the longest time I have worked for any employer, and this job does require education and training (including a graduate degree) in order to be hired. Before this position, most of my full-time jobs had either been in retail (several different stores, mostly department stores) or office jobs (at the administrative assistant level—which is not very specialized). Both of those types of jobs generally paid only a little better than minimum wage and did not require much of the “training and/or education” Steve mentioned in his description of a career.

My undergraduate degree is in music education, but I discovered while I was student teaching that although I liked many aspects of that profession, I did not want a career as a public school teacher—so until I determined what career path I did want to pursue, I needed jobs to make money to pay bills. In between full-time positions, I even worked with a temp agency more than once (which sometimes led to permanent positions).

In what I consider as somewhat lucky for me, being a librarian (at least for most of us in this field) usually involves both significant amounts of customer service as well as significant experience and time doing office-type work (especially using computers and various software programs), so I do see my prior jobs in retail and office work as parts of the journey in preparation for my career as a librarian (in addition to other jobs in education/teaching that were even more relevant for my current job). In a way, some of my career development happened while I was working different types of jobs.

Taking a rather circuitous route through a career journey is not necessarily unusual—I know plenty of other people who started out in one job or profession, didn’t like it, moved on to several others, before finally finding a career that they wanted to build on. Some of the more traditional—or direct—ways to develop one’s career include:

Workshops and/or classes to learn new skills (e.g. technology, communication, technical) that can be utilized in the chosen career
Workshops and/or classes to improve existing skills necessary for higher-level performance in the career--this might or might not include certification(s) and/or a degree(s)
Leadership and/or management training, since many career fields have professionals at various levels
Networking, including attending networking events and being active on online networking sites such as LinkedIn
Membership and participation in professional organization(s) specific to your field (e.g. librarians are often members of the American Library Association)

If you are a Central Penn College student or alumni, you can utilize the resources of Central Penn’s Career Services department. We also encourage you to check out the books currently on display in the library, which include the following: