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A Small Lecture About Career (Part 1)

This post is going to be challenging because this would be about academic stuffs
and I'm trying my best to simplify my explanation.

"Min skripsi lo tentang karir? Ih gue mau curhat dong soal kerjaan."
I get this a lot.

For those who don't know, I'm a final year student in Psychology and currently gabut nungguin jadwal sidang busy finishing my paper about career. I have a big interest in career since my second year in college which I've written earlier. I found this as an interesting topic and gave me a lot of insights on tailoring my own career journey. Unfortunately, I guess this kind of thing is not as familiar as other psychology theory ya. Well, thank God, there this guy named Super. He is like the God in career theory and his theory is the main theory I use on my paper. I owe my life to him a lot.

Ok, let's get to the business!
First of all, you have to know that CAREER IS NOT A JOB.

akademisi tapi ambil referensi dari wikipedia, oh the irony :p

Can you see the difference?
Yes, career is a series of occupation, job, role, education that a person has in his entire life
while job is just a small part of career.
Yes, picking a major is a part of pursuing your career.
Yes, we could say that being a mother is a part of career too.

Career talks about the entire life of a person, so there must be a development phase from time to time.
In every development phase, we face different kind of task. I mean, the task you have right now surely different from the task you had 10 years ago. You are now 22 y.o and facing 'finding a good job' task. 10 years ago the only struggle you had could only be finding the best Junior High School.

Now I'm going to give a simple explanation about what is actually happening in every phase of your career life. Moreover, what happen in our adolescence and adult phase, because skripsi aku bahasnya cuma tahapan remaja I guess most of blog reader are in this phase.

DISCLAIMER!Well, it's a theory of career development and it's a dynamic one.
No, the age range is not fixed, but the development mostly would go like that.
It might doesn't apply to all people, but most of them do.

1. Growth (0 to 14 years old)
This is the first step on knowing yourself. Wonder why you feel like you have so many interest and curiousity as a kid? Well that means you are on the right track of tailoring your career. Keep being curious and go explore many activities, because you the result of this first phase is knowing what you like, dislike, and start building your interest!

2. Exploration (15 to 24 years old)
Yeay, this is us! After knowing who you are in the first phase, this is the phase when we try to align the real world of work to ourselves. The result in this phase would be finding the most suitable job for us. 
Yes, there are 3 process:
Crystallization (15 to 18 years old)
The first process is crystallization, where you are being specified about the kind of education you are interested in. It will be shown in your choice of institution/major once you graduate from high school.
Specification (18 to 21 years old)
You are now in the major that you like. You are now starting to know the jobs that are related to your major. What you have to do now is exploring those jobs. Yes, that's why we do internships!
Implementation (22 to 24 years old)
Last process in exploration. You're already working on several jobs during your internships. Now it's time for trial and error again but with a bit longer commitment. This is the phase where you start focusing on developing yourself with your first job.

[Now you understand why a lot of articles tell us to 'find yourself' and/or 'love yourself' first, right? Because, knowing yourself is the base of every aspect of your life. Moreover, it could give you inner peace.]

3. Establishment (25 to 44 years old)
Yeah, you got the job. Now it's time to prove whether you really fits to the job or not. Most people are on the top of their career, because we already had the experiences and could excel in what we do. If we fit, it could lead to our individual satisfaction. 

4. Maintenance (44 to 65 years old)
You are getting older, now this is the phase where people tend to only maintain and fix some stuffs on your job. You need money (and saving some money for the old days), so most people somehow won't choose to leave the job.

5. Disengagement (above 65 years old)
You are officially old. Now you need to get ready to enjoy the rest of your life.

"WOW! Now I know. I guess...
But anyway, how to successfully deal with all the problems I have in every phase of life?"
We know that we will somehow move from one phase to other phase, in order to make the transition between each phase smoother, we have to be an adaptive person. In career theory, it's called career adaptability.

"OMG! So how to be an adaptive person?"
I'll explain on the next post because this post is soooo long and me no likey.

p.s. I'd love to hear your feedback or discuss about career. Feel free to contact me on my! :)


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