What is Career- Set of Job, Profession & Business or Else?

Updated August 7, 2022

When I asked to a boy “what is career” preparing for govt jobs, he started counting the names of some well known govt jobs in India. Although, he was correct only partially, this made me think once again that many of us are mistaken even in this information age.

If you are here out of doing some google search, I am sure you also have given some serious thought in getting to know the true nature of a career. It’s irony that Career has long been taken synonymous with jobs and professions and sometimes with businesses. However, it is something like painting an art in monochrome. I hope the post would be an apt reading to understand what makes a career.

What is a Career in Layman Terms?

The whole idea of the best career is that you feel at the top of world as you move along. Primarily, it requires that your passion is in sync with the kind of work you take up. And, then it also requires that you pair the work with right set of skill. Meaning, you are into best of all career options when you piece together the puzzle of Passion, work and skill set. So, essentially, the best career is one you chose to make the best. Now, before heading out, it is pretty much necessary to get clarity as to what a career means?

Career is a life-long employment status that involves a range of skills to navigate through various stages of employment. It is an employment ladder which you keep progressing on. At the core, Career is a dynamic notion and it doesn’t have to be a static concept. If, anything that you do has no more dynamism to let you prosper, it is not a career. From that point of view, a sustenance is not a career.

A Career involves your ongoing efforts which aims adding to productivity of any organization at one hand. On the other, it keeps raising your physical and mental well-being as you progress. Career is something that spans with broader goals including social well-being, and intangible essentials of life apart from materialistic gains and hence satisfaction.

Career as a Job, a Profession or a Business

Career and employment are taken synonymous and it is correct for the most part. Employment however is time and space specific but career is about a life span. You can find employment in a job, a profession or a business but career could be amalgamation of more than one of these three.

In my early days I confused a career with Jobs & Professions and never thought of a third aspect i.e, Business. I am sure there are many who also confuse career, job and profession with each other. But the matter of the fact is that Job, profession and Business are all three subsets of a Career. The third paradigm of career, i.e, business is not introduced about in majority of family. Ironically though, it is ultimate of all careers.

A job is a subset of career, that can only require a certain skill set with an employer as your head. Profession requires you a wider skill set than a Job and you do not have an employer to be reported to. A business apart from requiring general attributes of Job and professions also requires that you piece together the jobber and the professional.

Transitioning of Career Ventures Do offer Best to Grow

Pursuing a particular kind of career venture is not best of wisdom from the growth point of view. Growth means both materialistic and cognitive and faculty wise.

As abundantly clear, a career is a lifetime of all jobs, professions and businesses, whether they are related or unrelated, it is rather wise to tread switching back and forth. When the wholesome definition of a career takes into account all three subsets of employment job, profession and business, it should be but an obvious choice to have a taste of all.

For example, after my college I gave coaching to undergrads, then I was into sales profession and then I took a job with govt. and now I am a blogger (again a profession) and now I am an aspiring entrepreneur. The experience of going through the transitions is unmatched.

It is my personal take that best careers are those wherein, you start earning livelihood from a specific set of skill, move on to get a Job with that skill and then switch to a more elaborate spectrum of a profession and then finally put together everything for entrepreneurship.

Starting off with a Skill Set- The Crux to Experience a Lifetime Growth

The world has never been this dynamic from career point of view, when we talk in the parlance of technology and its sweeping impact on economy.

To a small firm with meagre resource, it can only take 2- 10 years to grow into a billion Dollar company but at the same time, big empires can also crash down in no time. So, the dynamism of the today’ economy also comes with high level of uncertainty.

For an individual living in the era of pure uncertainty, if I could name the dynamism by this term liberty of switching from job to a profession and vice versa could be the best proposition. Isn’t this the best proposition to use all your acquired skill sets through Jobs and profession into entrepreneurship? Of course it is! But, the only catch is the skill set that can help you doing all this. This is why, I always recommend youngsters in my own family too, to rely on their acquired skill.

Once considered highly secure, the Govt. jobs are today not that secure too. Govt. regimes everywhere are less into running enterprises and more into maintaining law & Order and into Taxation governance. Implication is that big Public Sector Undertakings too are being privatized. So, if there are less and less of PSUs there will be less and lesser chances of getting into Govt. jobs in future. The future jobs in govt. will be only in the sector of law & order. News of privatization of six major PSU of India in 2019, can be taken as a guiding principle.

But, if you have skill sets that can generate productivity, you do not need worrying about jobs and job security. Freelancing, professions and setting up your very own enterprises are always there for you.

Nature of Skill that You Need Understanding Well

Now, what do I mean by skill? Skill is something that causes to add to the productivity of a firm, company or a busy professional. This is my simple definition for skill. Even more simplistic approach of skill is the attributes of a person for which he/she can be hired by an employer/organization.

Have you heard this proverb: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” The proverb is age old but well signifies the importance of skill set. The fish is metaphor for the skill set here.

Skills could exist in variety of ways and in millions. But, if you are at the stage of deciding which skill sets you should move ahead with, check with search engines which have big number of searches. And, then figure out the skills which have growing trends.

Further, vastness of aptitude & skill in today’s time can although span over millions in number, skill of writing and speaking is mother of all skills. You can build any other skill set over them. Writing and speaking is basically the most fundamental skill the civilization has grown resting over.

Yet another emphasis on skills and aptitude is making a habit of honing it. Keep polishing your skills and you will always in demand. It is equally important for your enterprises too, where if you are into improvising you will be out of market. To my best understanding, leveraging the power of internet is the best way to honing your skill and setting in improvisation. I have heard one visionary saying “If you are not on internet you might get kicked out of the market”.

The True Nature of Unemployment Today

In today’s job marketplace, there are lot of hype about job crisis. However, if you go through different statistics and surveys published under many different sources you might get embarrassed at the reality. The real picture is that majority of the unemployed population is because of their un-employablility. So, the crux is that if you have right kind of skill set you are not going to sit idle and instead there is huge possibilities of yours getting hired.

Once India comes out of the notion that Jobs & especially govt. jobs are not alone the career, the made up crisis of unemployment will soon vanish. When you start focusing on skill building, the problem will seem changing its hue. This is logical and rational. Why should one hire you if you can’t contribute to the productivity of his organization? The era is of skill and the one with right skill set would never sit idle to become burden to economy.

Accordingly, career101.in went on scanning through many different resources of all kinds, be it govt reports, or reports from credible Pvt. institutions to get a judicious picture of unemployment that looks more about the flawed mindset of ours. In the age of information, tech & web 3 we can not afford to think like era of industrialization.

The information today is available at your finger tips and getting a new skill too was never this easy before. Even the world’s best of universities today have gone online for adding to your skills. The Howard, MIT and Pennsylvenia are all offering affordable online courses, for which you would have needed spending lakhs of dollars earlier. Internet has democratized the whole gamut of education, information and employability. And, starting point for your multi-dimensional career could be anything literally.

What is Career? Understanding Career as a Set of Job, Profession & Business