The Progression of Working Life
Throughout your working life, you’ll encounter friends and enemies. You’ll also acquire a sense of competitiveness, fulfill several goals, and learn from your mistakes. Not only that, but you’ll also get the chance to turn your aspirations into realities. Your job is an important part of your identity and social environment and also structures your life. However, a career is so much more than that.
Your working life will be very different depending on which stage you’re in. In this article, we’re going to explore the conclusions derived from studies and research on the progression of working life.
We can say that there are 3 major working life stages: job search, finding and maintaining a job, and retirement. Let’s delve deeper into them.
Job search
One of the main goals of young adults is finding a job that will allow them to be productive and independent at the same time. In order to be able to become independent, most young people choose the best paying jobs. On the contrary, older adults who are already independent consider job satisfaction their main goal.
You have to keep in mind that there are many factors that influence the way in which people search for a job. One of the most important ones is family support. This support could have a direct or indirect impact on a person’s job search. It’s direct, for example, when someone from that person’s family helps them find a job through one of their contacts. This can lead to specific work roles or status.
Now, family can also influence the search indirectly. For example, when they give them a good education or by promoting certain attitudes or behaviors.
One central aspect when it comes to job search is social status. Research shows that families tend to transmit their social status to their children, which influences their working life.
Working life on the job
Once a person finds a job, their goals shift to maintaining that job or getting a better position. It’s important to keep in mind that working life today is much more unpredictable than in the past. That’s why young people today are more motivated to change jobs.
There are two central aspects involved in how much someone values their job. These determine whether or not people will stay in their jobs. These aspects are their salary and the work environment. Your wage is the extrinsic motivation that your job gives you. Despite the fact that it’s very important at first, as working life goes on, pay tends to slip into second place in terms of importance.
On the other hand, the work environment is the intrinsic motivational factor. This will determine a person’s level of satisfaction with a job. After all, the ultimate objective of employment is to allow a person to meet certain productivity and quality of life goals. This tends to be more closely related to work environment than salary.
Retirement: The end of working life
All life stages must come to an end, and retirement is the end of working life. But you have to keep in mind that retirement doesn’t have to be a jarring break from employed life. Rather, it should be a transition.
There are 3 different ways to look at retirement:
- Honeymoon: These are the retired individuals who start to do activities they had always wanted to do but couldn’t because they were working. They have time to travel, study again, discover new hobbies, etc. These people tend to take on retirement voluntarily and happily. They also have enough money to enjoy this “honeymoon”.
- Rest and relaxation: The retired adults decide to rest from their working life obligations.
- Continuity: These adults continue the activities from their working life after retirement. Here, we find people who were very satisfied with their jobs and want to keep doing them. The difference is that they don’t have the same work obligations as before.
As we can see, retirement is the end of working life but it’s not the end of life itself. Some people see it as a life crisis. However, it’s just a stage of life with new challenges and goals.
