PLEASE RESPOND TO THE FOLLOWING DISCUSSION BOARD RESPONSE: My elementary years began with my father working the night shift at UPS while putting himself through college and ended with him making good money as an accountant at a top firm in Manhattan. While the salary was a blessing to our family, the job came with other challenges related to the time and alcohol consumption required to wine and dine clients in this field. My father left this job during my middle school years and started working as a computer developer for city hospitals before computer programming became a major or a career. My mother was a stay-at-home mom with no college education. My aunts and grandmothers worked in various fields: nursing, retail, fundraising, and business. Law enforcement also ran deep in my family with multiple police officers and FBI agents.
In elementary school, I wanted to be a writer or a teacher. I wanted to become a lawyer, journalist, or politician in middle school. Looking back, I realize there was pressure to choose more professional careers. Only two women in my family did not work outside the home, a choice that was seen negatively. I believed any career was open to me. I watched family members raised in poverty by a single mother go on to become CEOs, accountants, and an FBI agent. I watched my father put himself through school and go from wearing UPS browns to ties and suits, never acting like one job was superior or changing how he treated himself or others. He was a model of Luke 6:31, treating others as he wanted to be treated (New International Version, 2011). My father taught us as young children how to program computers, communicate effectively, and hold ourselves professionally. I don’t recall ever thinking there was a career I could not do. I just did not want to become a stay-at-home mother.
Holland’s classification system of social, artistic, enterprising, realistic, and conventional types may have been helpful to me as a child (Niles & Bowlsbey, 2021). Given how strongly I currently score in social and enterprising, it would have been interesting to see if those were present at a young age. I would also be curious to see if my aversion to realistic occupations was present then. Research shows that even the act of rating your motivations can lead to more adaptation of goals (Sheldon et al., 2019). A younger career intervention may have changed my career trajectory, but it might not have. The irony of my career journey was the decade I spent as a stay-at-home mother after wanting to do anything else. I now know what a gift that was to my children and myself.
Word Count: 442
References
New International Version. (2011). BibleGateway.com. http://www.biblegateway.com/versions/New-Internati…
Niles, S., & Harris-Bowlsbey, J. (2021). Career Development Interventions (6th ed.). Pearson Education.
Sheldon, K., Holliday, G., Titova, L., & Benson, C. (2019). Comparing Holland and self-determination theory measures of career preference as predictors of career choice. Journal of Career Assessment 28(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/1069072718823003Links to an external site.
