Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the best answer to each of the following questions from 31 to 40.
What if you don’t have ONE dream job?
Do you remember being asked what you wanted to be when you grew up? No doubt, the more imaginative your answer, the more approval you would get. But once we reach adolescence, there’s far less tolerance for answers like, “I’m going to be a marine biologist, circus clown and journalist!” Now the question translates as: You are allowed one identity in this life, so which is it? [I]
At school, there’s pressure to focus on your strengths, and choose a subject to major in at university. [II] The message that you need to specialise is reinforced in many contexts. [III] Career guidance books and counsellors give you tests to help you find your niche and identify your dream job. [IV]
But what happens if you’re wired differently? Let’s say you’re curious about several subjects, and there are many things you’d like to study. If you’re unable or unwilling to settle on a single career path, you might worry that you don’t have one true calling like everybody else and that, therefore, your life lacks purpose. As the saying goes, you’re a ‘jack of all trades, master of none’.
In reality, few people are just ‘one thing’. A rare few have a vocation and stick to it, but for most young people who will make up the workforce of the future, ‘one thing’ is not relevant anymore. For our parents’ and grandparents’ generation, it was normal to work in the same profession and often the same company for thirty or more years. Those days are long gone.
The ambitious young people of today are more interested in moving around and doing different things. In the modern workplace, people are working flexibly and the individual is in control of their professional life and in a position to make decisions about how, when and where they work. Rather than finding something and doing it forever, the new challenge is to find a way of working that works for you.