Unit 3. Starting a Career
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1. Choices Already Made and Still to Be Made
Learning Objectives:
Learn the decision-making strategy.
Analyze the major factors of job satisfaction.
Evaluate your personality traits and motivations.
Text 1. Choosing a Career Path
If you are an undergraduate in a foreign languages department, clearly you have already made most of the choices: you have espoused English for life. By the way, what motivated your choice a number of years ago? It's common knowledge that we have to decide about our future at a stage in our lives when we can easily be swayed by factors which have little or nothing to do with our actual needs and abilities. The trouble is that we often choose our careers for the wrong reasons.
Take, for instance, those numerous people push-guided by their parents, who have their own idea of what their children ought to do with their lives and what professions have a high rating on the modern job market. Some of these loving dads and moms want to see their child as a lawyer simply because they themselves wanted to practice law but failed to do it for this or that reason. At the same time, some of the young people thoughtlessly follow in their fathers' footsteps, or inherit the family business, because this is expected of them and they cannot imagine doing anything else. On the other hand, others decide against going their parents' way, saying that whatever they might do they will certainly not do what their parents did.
Many teenagers and young people model themselves after somebody they respect and admire. We may be persuaded to embark on a career for which we are unsuited by teachers or older friends, who want us to follow in their track because they simply like their job and think it's wonderful. Apart from pressures from parents, teachers and other people, we may be swayed by other factors, such as the glamour of a profession and its immense publicity. Many girls pass through the stage in their lives when they want to be "top models" or movie stars irrespective of their looks and abilities. Needles to say, another powerful factor determining the choices made is the prospect of earning "a lot of money". While the mechanism of money-making may be obscure for young people, they still understand that some professions are much better paid than others. This was the reason why in the early 1990s thousands of young people in this country rushed into banking, finance and law, only to become redundant after the crisis of 1998.
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Whatever your motives were, it looks at the present moment that you have made a good move choosing English for your profession. In a non-English setting of our country there is a growing demand for foreign language specialists whose target language is English. The phenomenon of a "shrinking world" has intensified the already existing need for a common language for wider communication, and English seems to be a wonderful candidate for this role. It is widely used for purposes such as business and international trade or in order to gain access to scientific, technical and literary materials that exist mainly in English. The implication is that English is a valuable asset in career advancement that gives you a definite advantage.
At the same time you cannot but understand that to merely "know English" is not in itself much of an asset nowadays, because many other people know it too. Some people would tell you that English is not a profession, but a must for everyone. To survive the new trends and changes, it is good insurance to have other back-up skills to add to your language skills. If you are a student of a pedagogical university you have those major skills already — that is, the ability to teach English. The forecast is that the demand for teachers will continue to grow and by far outstrip the supply. Teaching opportunities tend to vary with changes in economic conditions: new institutions of learning mushroom in this country, including fee-paying secondary schools, gymnasiums, colleges and courses. Another popular area of teaching English is on-the-job or in-service training where a company may contract you to teach their staff on the company premises. If you need more flexibility on account of your family status, you may teach from home. With positive trends in society's attitude towards small business, you can build your own network and either give one-to-one lessons or teach in a group setting.
Already, within the university walls, some of the undergraduates acquire secretarial skills and study professional typing, filing and business correspondence which may be a great asset in modern offices. The prospects for secretarial positions appear excellent — they are on the list of demand jobs in the category of service industries. If you possess the required skills of communication in both written and spoken English, your chances of getting a job as a personal assistant look very good. The secretarial route is naturally maligned by some university graduates, who feel overqualified for this position, but it can provide a way into many careers. Besides, if you start as a secretary you can get a valuable insight into the working of the company. Secretarial temping during the summer time, for example, will help you acquire new skills, and try yourself at a career apart from college.
Some other undergraduates feel lacking and uncompetitive on the modern job market, and make up their minds to further their education and add a degree in a different field to the list of their achievements. However, if you would like to stay on in education, doing your Master's or a post-graduate course, you need to look closely at your motives. If you have a genuine passion for your subject and want to make a career in the academic world, or you know you need a further degree for the
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field of work you plan to enter, your choice is good. However, what you are to ask yourself is: do you really enjoy studying, acquiring theoretical and practical knowledge, spending hours in the library for independent research? Are you a self-starter as far as studies are concerned, or are you just feeling immature and afraid to leave the university world and start a career of your own? Should this be the case, you may be overestimating the value of academic qualifications at the expense of practical experience.
So, as you see, you have not made all your final choices: you've chosen the direction but you can follow different paths. At this time of your life, you can make more intelligent and conscious choices, especially if you approach them as an effective decision maker.
Decision making is almost universally defined as choosing between alternatives or narrowing your choice. In our particular case, the process of decision making can be broken down into three stages or steps:
Information gathering stage. What you are expected to do at this particular stage is to explore the market, and identify the target jobs and positions that can fit your qualifications. For the information search you can rely on your network, study the stories of other graduates of your department, and go through the job advertisements in the press or job sites on the Internet.
Evaluation stage. This stage requires assessment of the relative merits and demerits of the job, in terms of your own personality, priorities and motivations. We must not forget that social influence has a great impact on decision-making behavior and if we don't want to make a wrong or a biased one, we need to be sure that we are listening to our own voice, instead of being influenced by social pressure or rule of thumb.
Choice stage. The third and the final stage is the actual choice — selecting a particular alternative among those available to suit your particular personality and qualifications at that moment. The success of this stage depends strongly on the two previous stages — how complete and objective the initial list of alternatives was, and how accurately we processed the information at hand.
Some people work to live: they are so busy making a living that they don't have time to make a life. Others live to work: their work makes them fulfilled, brings real satisfaction. These lucky ones would work even if they did not have to. Is it just a matter of good luck or is it choosing their route well? It ought to be easy to choose the right path: just do the things for which you have a natural talent. Your choice can be more grounded at present, as you have some life and sometimes even work experience — you've been around and observed people performing in various fields, you also know your priorities better. No matter how many career advisers you may consult, the most direct way to predict anybody's success in a career is to simply ask: "What would you like to do?"
Tasks
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Some people would definitely tell you that English is not a profession but a must for everyone.
With the positive trends in the society's attitude towards small business you can build your own network and give either one-to-one lessons or teach in a group setting.
Secretarial temping during the summer time will help you acquire new skills and try yourself at a career apart from college.
Some people work to live, they are so busy making a living that they don't have time to make a life. Others live to work: their work makes them fulfilled, brings real satisfaction.
Read the text again and write out all the sentence starters such as: "by the way", "it's common knowledge." These starters are responsible for providing the text with logical structure and making it coherent. Classify these starters as to their functions and meanings such as introductory starters, starters for expressing opinion, starters denoting time, condition, and comparison. Are there any other groups that you can single out?
Complete the design given below on the basis of the text and your own background knowledge. Do you think there are some other paths available for the graduates of a foreign languages department?
Text 2. Is There Such a Thing as a Dream Job?
A good job means different things to different people. You might be surprised to hear that some people would just like to do nothing and get paid. Others feel that the more they work, the happier they are, and they cannot wait till the weekend is over and Monday sets in. It is a proven fact that there are a lot of people who like mundane routine jobs but view a change as a disaster. In other words, they prefer to be told what to do. There are, however, adventurers and entrepreneurs who love risk-taking and decision making to be part of their day-to-day life. Some of us enjoy being solo and taking all the responsibilities for the work we do. There are also those who enjoy the feeling of being part of the team or belonging to an organization or a group of people. These people would never enjoy working free-lance: they will stick with their group no matter what happens. Besides solo workers and team-players there are leaders who like team-building and running a business or a team. It is not surprising that people like that will not enjoy working for a big, formal impersonal organization in which they will be viewed as an interchangeable part of the machine. Thus job satisfaction does not depend on the job alone, but on the jobholders as well.
There are several ways of evaluating a potential job or a job offer, but before we make a decision we need to look at the job itself. To avoid any role ambiguity, it i> reasonable to ask yourself whether you understand what will be expected of you in
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this or that position, in other words, to look into the nature of the job duties that each position may offer you. There is evidence to indicate that when students' majors coincide with the job duties their job satisfaction is expected to be higher. In other words, we enjoy doing what we know how to do, and what we feel professionally competent to do. However, we may not enjoy doing one and the same thing every day without any challenges and opportunities to grow and develop. "Boring" is a scary word for many people who want to enrich their minds and learn. Lots of people are also very sensitive to the status of their job: that is, the value which is attributed by the society to this or that profession, at a given moment in time. Instability of economy, downsizing, and constant changes in the market seriously affect job security, which for many people is a top value. Small businesses, joint ventures, commercial banks and investment companies in this country can provide many sad examples of how people who used to be highly paid and saw themselves at the top of their professions became redundant overnight with their company failing, downsizing or closing down. While in the West losing a job has been one of the career hazards for years, in Russia, with its desire to espouse a job for life, it may cause a substantial stress to some workers.
The pay is recognized to be a significant but complex and multidimensional factor in job satisfaction. Besides the salary being a major way to attain basic needs, it is also viewed by many people as a reflection of the value attributed to their work by the society and the company. With the advent of new international practices, benefits begin to be recognized as a very substantial part of the incentives. For example, fringe benefits like health insurance, free training or family vacations can be a substantial part of what an employee gets from his company. But material incentives, for all their importance, are not always number one: in all cultures there .ire people who would prefer status, the reputation of the company they work for, or moral satisfaction over the pay.
Promotion opportunities may be high on the priority list for many people. There are certain jobs and certain companies in which you reach your ceiling pretty fast. For example, in many big multinational companies, which graduates of Russian universities often view as a dream job market, it would be rather difficult to get a serious promotion unless you were on the profit-making line. As a personal assistant, for example, you can certainly raise your grade after you improve your professional skills, but it is very unlikely that you can get into the partner's chair which is taken by an American expatriate. It is easier to get a promotion in the sparsely saturated academic world, but often individuals who are promoted on the basis of seniority do not experience as much satisfaction as those who are promoted on the basis of job performance.
Most people view supervision or management as an important part of their jobs :hat may increase or decrease their job satisfaction. If the management is employee-centered, the supervisor takes a personal interest in his workers' welfare, and provides advice and assistance to the individual, people feel more important and satisfied. In many cases, people feel happier when they can participate in making
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decisions that affect their own jobs. In Russia, with its highly personalized touch in human relations, it is extremely important to have a boss who communicates with the workers on a personal as well as an official level. In America, more than a half of employees admit that managers do not always do a very good job in this dimension, seldom providing them with regular feedback or trying to solve their problems.
The nature of the work group ox people you work with is another important factor in job satisfaction. The work group may vary in age, social status and educational background. The same is true about the customers with whom you work. Working together with diversified groups may bring either satisfaction or disappointment and anxiety. For some teachers used to more or less homogeneous groups it is a great challenge to shift from one audience to another. We cannot but admit the fact that some of us are better teachers for young children and some others for adults, just as we may have preferences for colleagues who are our peers, seniors or juniors. Lots of people in this country are committed to their organizations because they like and respect the people who work there.
Working conditions may also have an effect on our job satisfaction. If the working conditions are good, and we work in attractive, clean surroundings, we find it easier to carry out our jobs. On the other hand, if the working conditions are poor we fine it more difficult to get things done. Many of us do not give working conditions a great deal of thought, unless they are extremely bad. Not all companies provide their employees with recreation facilities or even a place to have lunch. In Russia, where office space is always a problem, we often suffer from being crowded and having no personal space. If you live far away from your place of work, you might also suffer from endless commuting or spending hours in public transport or traffic. It is no surprise that lots of people look for the jobs which are within a reasonable reach fron: their homes.
Research reports that highly satisfied workers have better mental and physica. health, learn new job-related tasks more quickly and feel good about themselves ir. general. Consequently, they are more ready to be cooperative, helping co-worker-and customers. On the negative side, people whose jobs give them no satisfaction tend to feel nervous, tense, anxious, worried and distressed. They suffer from low self-esteem, and may develop inferiority complexes or different phobias.
Just as you don't marry the first man or woman you meet, you don't take the first job offered. However, even if you've made a mistake in judgment, don't let regret-rankle in your soul: you can always make a change! You don't have to stick to the job that makes you unhappy, making everybody around you unhappy too. But if yoi. have already made one wrong move, you need to grow cautious and analyze your losses to determine where you have made a mistake. Don't try to excuse yourself, bu: guard against a repetition of the same error.
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8. Read the text once again and find different sentence starters and connectives which may express:
presenting the results of research; giving evidence; drawing a conclusion; providing additional information; providing illustrations; generalizing; specifying; contrasting (the positive with the negative).
Are there any other useful sentence starters and connectives which make the text easier to read and understand? What do they express? Make a list of them to be used as a language bank for further activities.
9. Make up a list of factors which define job satisfaction the way they are presented in the text. Specify such generalized concepts as job itself. Fill out the following table specifying the importance you attach to this or that factor. After the table is complete rearrange the factors in order of their priority to you personally.
Factor Universally important Depends on the culture Depends on the person
10. Conducting a survey on job satisfaction. This is a creative independent task that will require some time and effort. The students of the group are requested to establish contacts with former graduates of their department of their own university or another one with similar orientation. It is highLy recommended that the students try to approach former graduates who work in different fields such as teaching (in a secondary school, university, etc.), interpreting, doing office work or doing a post-graduate course. The tasks are: a) to identify the degree of job satisfaction, b) to assess the technical skills with which the University provided them for the job they hold, c) to specify the personality traits which help them to perform or frustrate them in performing the job that they hold.
Before conducting a survey the students are to prepare questionnaires which are to be filled out by the respondents, either in person or over the telephone. The questionnaires are to be processed, compared and presented in class discussion.
Prompts
It is recommended to encourage students to keep minutes and make notes of the major conclusions related to this or that career path as they are presented by others.
The final goal is to come out with conclusions and an assessment of each career path in terms of job satisfaction.
Text 3. A Personal Inventory Guide
Evaluating relative merits of the potential job cannot be effective without evaluating ourselves. It goes without saying that in the first place we need to identify whether our qualifications and technical skills fit the position that we find attractive However, it is much easier to evaluate our technical skills than understand our own personality and motives.
People are different: they interact with other people and situations in different ways. The word "personality" has an interesting origin. It can be traced to the Latin words persona, which can be translated as "to speak through." The Latin words were used to denote the masks worn by actors in ancient Greece and Rome. So the contemporary usage of the word stemmed from understanding "personality" as the
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face that the person (actor) displays to the public. Academic definitions of personality are concerned more with the person than with the role he plays, but most personality theorists recognize the person—situation interaction. Personality is at the root of how people view themselves and how they interact with others and with different situations.
How people affect others and how they understand and view themselves depend to a certain extent upon their external appearance (height, weight, facial features, color). It is universally acknowledged that good-looking people get what they want with less pain than those who were not born attractive. At the same time, it cannot be denied that "attractive" is a very subjective word depending on personal, cultural and historical standards. Moreover, people who are too attractive may have additional difficulties in their career advancement as compared to those of us who do not catch the public's eye immediately. You can hardly imagine a girl with the figure and looks of a top model to be suitable as a conference interpreter, unless you want everybody to look at the interpreter rather than concentrate on the subject of the discussion.
It is not so easy to change our external appearance but we can certainly improvise with our clothes and accessories. Many modern companies, especially in the West, have a so-called dress code, which is the style of clothes accepted in this or that company. Most law firms and banks will require their male workers to wear suits and ties all through the week with the exception of Friday, when in view of the coming weekend more casual clothes like pants and sweaters may be permitted. It is common practice to change a shirt every day. If you come to the office wearing the same outfit you wore yesterday, you risk being asked: "Where did you sleep last night?" In companies like that, women will certainly avoid wearing bright makeup and aggressive perfume, just as they will avoid wearing loud, provocative clothes. At the same time some computer companies may have a lot of specialists wearing pony-tails and jeans, especially if they spend much of their time working with hardware. So the clothes we wear should conform to the nature of our occupation, as well as to the standards and rules shared in the organization we work for. Unless you are a clothes designer, it is not appropriate to introduce your personal style, especially during the orientation period in a well-established company.
Although external appearance and the impression we produce are highly important, it is still internal personality traits which are instrumental for understanding how effectively a person will interact with this or that group of people or situation. Sometimes we tend to be simplistic and try to describe personality by a single dominant characteristic (strong, weak or "nice" which is a frequent substitute for "nothing special"). The most significant traits for job performance on which personality theorists agree can be briefly summarized as follows:
Extraversion. Social, talkative and assertive.
Agreeableness. Good-natured, cooperative and trusting.
Conscientiousness. Responsible, dependable, persistent and achievement- oriented.
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Emotional stability. Viewed from a negative standpoint: tense, insecure and nervous.
Openness to experience. Imaginative, artistically sensitive and intellectual.
It is true that people demonstrate different personality traits in different job situations but most of these "big five" traits have an impact on job performance and indicate the importance of the role that personality traits play in career success. Another approach to the analysis of personality is associated with the motives that people pursue in their day-to-day life depending on their personality traits. There are universal motives which are shared by most people: the motive to be loved, the motive to belong and the motive to be safe. However, even these motives are demonstrated by different individuals to a different extent. Power motives and achievement motives are not as universal as those mentioned above: it takes a leader's personality to be driven by the power motive. Thus we can see that different individuals can be attracted by certain roles which help them satisfy their personal needs, such as a desire to govern or care for others. And different jobs predetermine different roles: a road policeman dealing with a drunken driver does not play the same role as a hospital nurse or an interpreter. A typical description of personality types might include the following:
Authoritarian: shows tendency for liking authority and exercising power.
Affi/iative: shows tendency for building close relationships with others.
Conformist: shows tendency for thinking and acting the same as others do.
Aggressive: shows tendency towards aggressive behavior in order to achieve aims.
Co-operative: shows tendency to work closely with others in performing tasks.
Achieving: shows tendency towards achieving status, career success and praise.
As we can see from the above, there's no such thing as a "pure type" because people usually combine features belonging to different types. We may also change gradually from one type to another as we gain more experience and maturity, or at least we learn to demonstrate different features to different people in different situations. Nevertheless personality types do exist, as you might have noticed if you had an opportunity to observe very young children with hereditary inclination to a certain personality type. The type is not static because it will be subject to various environmental and socialization experiences and learning. But at the stage of life that you are in at the moment, each of you presents a "product" of family, education system, society and work experience if any. This product has its value (moderately high, no doubt) but to become competitive on the modern job market you must find your niche or your target customer. The more successfully you do it, the more in demand you will be and the more you can expect to earn.
Tasks
1. Read the text and write out all the definitions which are given in it. Look up the wore "personality" in several dictionaries and make a list of definitions. Prepare a small talon the meaning and usage of the word. Don't forget to speak about its origin. Use the expressions from the text such as to have (an interesting) origin, to be traced (down) tc to denote, contemporary usage, to stem from, to be at the root of.
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PART 2. Exploring What the Market Has to Offer
Learning Objectives: