What Are the Career Doldrums? :: Employment Jobs Work Essays

What Are the Career Doldrums?The belief of the occupational group stagnation is non a new one. Individuals have suffered from the symptoms associated with this judgment for as long as jobs and careers have existed. What is new is the more turn out acknowledgment of the phenomenon. Judith Waterman, a career counselor in San Mateo, California, has seen her client ungenerous change significantly during the last 20 years. After beginning with reentry women in the 1970s, Waterman reports that during the 1980s, she was seeing high achievers who were thinking, How did I get here and wherefore am I not happy? but they were keeping it on a lower floor wraps. By the mid-1990s, however, she reports that it had become more acceptable to admit career dissatisfaction (Hornaday 1995, online). Betsy Collard, some other career specialist, believes that part of this trend is related to how personally knowledge take shapeers pile their work and the meaning of it, but that it is also related to changes in the economy. In times of change, everybody turns inward to get clear about whats important to them, who they are, and what they indispensability out of this (ibid.). The career doldrums may also be associated with authoritative career power points. Careers are like lives in that they go through stages that much complicate transitions into new phases. One framework (Nicholson cited in Kidd 1998) for analyzing work transitions includes the side by side(p) stages. The preparation stage that occurs prior to assuming a work role. . The fancy stage that covers the early days of a career experience in which individuals begin to make sense of the chosen career. This stage may include shock, rejection, and regret. . The adjustment stage that involves the period in which individuals learn to do their work and make the adjustments necessary to reduce any dissonance between career choice and personal traits. . The stabilization stage in which job ca rrying out is the main focus. In this stage, failure, boredom, and stagnation are not uncommon. The symptoms associated with the career doldrums are most closely aligned with the stabilization stage. Individuals are not likely to become bored with or dissatisfied with their careers until they have had an chance to experience them for a while. Individuals who are in careers that are not a good fit may begin experiencing symptoms in the adjustment stage as they accommodate their careers to their personal traits and aptitudes.