Self-definition: Is it your job or your career? Does it even matter?

By Marco Buscaglia, Tribune Content Agency
Published in the Chicago Tribune, Oct. 25, 2020

If you’re going by the letter of the law—at least the Merriam-Webster Dictionary’s letter of the law—there’s a clear distinction between “job” and “career.” Webster's defines job as “a regular remunerative position.” It defines career as “a profession for which one trains and which is undertaken as a permanent calling.” Sounds pretty simple. The former is the singular position, the latter is the lifelong profession. Until it isn’t. 

“The word ‘career’ has a much broader meaning today than it did in the past,” says Dominick Gaitano, a former U.S. Department of Labor analyst who now pairs young professionals with jobs overseas. “It can be an evolving definition over the course of your entire life.”

Shifting interests

Gaitano says it's human nature to adapt the “job” and “career” definitions to your own life. “A job may be that nine-to-five thing you do every day to pay the mortgage,” he says. “A career is something with more staying power. It's spread out longer, maybe from your early twenties to the time you retire, and for most of us, it's what we do.”

Essentially, the title, below the name, according to Gaitano. “Teacher, author, engineer, assembly-line worker, landscaper, electrician, certified public accountant, chef, psychologist. Those are careers,” he says, acknowledging that they can be used interchangeably during a person’s life. “There are people who define themselves as teachers in their 20s,  graphic designers in their 30s and restaurateurs in their 40s. Some career shifts are dramatic and have fascinating backstories—the plumber who takes night classes to become an attorney or the administrative assistant who opens up a donut shop after 12 years of setting up executive meetings and ordering office supplies. Where does one career stop and the other begin?”

The odd thing, Gaitano argues, is that most people define themselves by what they do before who they are. “That’s what people ask—‘what do you do?’—so we answer with our jobs, which may be the least interesting thing bout us,” he says. “We don’t start off my telling people that we’re mothers or that we write songs or that we are incredible chefs. We just tell them what we do.”  

Hard to define

Pam Farnsworth, a social worker in Philadelphia, says that’s a difficult question to answer. “I think the very idea of defining a career today is problematic,” says Farnsworth. “In the past, you knew what you were going to be when you accepted your high school diploma. If your father was a bricklayer, chances are that you would have been a bricklayer. Even if you went to school, you had a fairly good idea of the type of job you wanted when you graduated.”

Not today, says Farnsworth. “People react to low wages, to relocation, to their own ambition and other factors,” she says. “And now, throw in COVID-19. Careers don’t mean as much as they used to. People want to keep moving.”

Navya Banerjee, a 44-year-old artist in Toronto, says she’s been defining her career for years, acknowledging that it’s led to some confusion with her clients. Ward, who owns and operates a landscape business, says she’s been calling herself an artist ever she began working in a flower shop when she was 12. “When I'm asked to work on the outside of someone's home or to create something for inside their home, I'm creating something. Creation is art. Creators are artists,” she says. 

Before you roll your eyes, Banerjee says she’s well aware of “how pretentious” she sounds. She also says she doesn’t care. “When I say things like that out loud  I always think to myself ‘wow, you sound like a real piece of work.’ But I'm not saying it that way. What I'm saying is that I approach my job in a certain way and that approach is what defines me,” she says. “I approach my job like an artist therefore, I’m an artist.”