What Are the Career Doldrums? :: Employment Jobs Work Essays

What Are the C beer Doldrums?The notion of the career doldrums is not a untested one. Individuals have suffered from the symptoms associated with this concept for as yearn as jobs and careers have existed. What is new is the more open acknowledgment of the phenomenon. Judith Waterman, a career counselor in San Mateo, California, has seen her client base change importantly during the last 20 years. After beginning with reentry women in the 1970s, Waterman reports that during the 1980s, she was perceive high achievers who were thinking, How did I get here and why am I not happy? but they were keeping it under wraps. By the mid-1990s, however, she reports that it had wrench more acceptable to admit career dissatisfaction (Hornaday 1995, online). Betsy Collard, another career specialist, believes that give away of this trend is related to how own(prenominal)ly knowledge workers view their work and the importee of it, but that it is also related to changes in the economy. In times of change, everybody turns interior to get clear about whats important to them, who they are, and what they want out of this (ibid.). The career doldrums may also be associated with certain career typifys. Careers are like lives in that they go through stops that frequently include transitions into new phases. One framework (Nicholson cited in Kidd 1998) for analyzing work transitions includes the following stages. The preparation stage that occurs prior to assuming a work role. . The encounter stage that covers the first days of a career experience in which individuals begin to turn sense of the chosen career. This stage may include shock, rejection, and regret. . The adjustment stage that involves the period in which individuals learn to do their work and make the adjustments requisite to reduce any dissonance between career choice and personal traits. . The stabilization stage in which job performance is the main focus. In this stage, failure, b oredom, and stagnation are not uncommon. The symptoms associated with the career doldrums are virtually closely aligned with the stabilization stage. Individuals are not likely to flummox bored with or dissatisfied with their careers until they have had an opportunity to experience them for a while. Individuals who are in careers that are not a good check into may begin experiencing symptoms in the adjustment stage as they intromit their careers to their personal traits and aptitudes.