The choice of an occupation may determine whether one will be employed or unemployed. In some occupations employment is notoriously irregular; in others it is much more stable and secure. By choosing an occupation in which employment is known to be relatively stable, one may increase the probability that he will have a job even when millions of other persons are out of work.
In severe economic depressions as many as 75 percent of the workers in some occupations and industries have been unemployed. At the same time less than 10 percent of the workers in other fields were out of work, and in some occupations employment actually increased.
Even in very mild recessions, there are striking differences in the rates of unemployment among different groups of workers.
The choice of an occupation may determine success or failure. Many things affect success. They include effort, luck, and knowing the right people. They include also the ability of the worker to perform satisfactorily the tasks assigned to him. People differ in both the nature and the level of their abilities, and occupations differ in the abilities required for their acceptable performance. By choosing an occupation which will utilize his strengths and make only minimum demands upon his weaknesses, one may increase the probability of his own success.
The choice of an occupation may determine whether one will enjoy or detest his work. There are probably few, if any, occupations in which a person never has to do anything that he dislikes, but there is no need for most of us to work at jobs in which we dislike most of the things we have to do. Despite popular impressions to the contrary, modern mass production does not condemn all factory workers to misery.
By the wise choice of an occupation, one may find a large share of life's pleasures and satisfactions in his work. Although we have had much research on vocational aptitudes and vocational interests, we have had comparatively little on what might be called the emotional fitness of a man for a job or of a job for a man.
One's job must furnish an outlet suitable to one's particular, personal emotional needs. The greatest part of one's emotional life is lived in one's job, not elsewhere, as is commonly supposed. Different professions and vocations offer quite different emotional outlets; even specialties within a profession offer different outlets.
One may be more than adequately equipped intellectually, and with special ability for a given profession, but if that profession does not offer the emotional outlet peculiar to one's own needs, unhappiness and discontent follow. Even though material and professional success may come, it is likely to be as dust in the mouth. After considerable trial and error, other partial outlets are found that make the situation bearable, but there is likely to be an element of frustration throughout that makes for unhappiness.
The choice of an occupation influences almost every other aspect of life. It affects a woman's chances of marriage. It determines where the family will live, where the children will go to school, and how often they will move. It determines the persons with whom the worker will associate during much of the day and thus affects his choice of friends. In subtle ways it changes the values, the ideals, the standards, and the daily conduct of the worker and helps to determine the kind of person he will become. It helps to determine both the economic and the social status of the entire family. It may affect the worker's health, both mental and physical; the frequency with which he sees his family; and the amount of time that he spends with them.
Whether family income will increase or decrease with advancing age, whether it will be stable or erratic, whether it will provide for health and comfort or actually threaten survival in case of illness may depend on the occupational choice of the breadwinner.
Occupational choices determine how a democratic society will utilize its manpower. The modest young person who is choosing his own field of work may not think much about the impact of his choice upon human welfare, but the aggregate of thousands of such choices may determine where serious shortages and surpluses of manpower will occur. Economic rewards, public policy, and military conscription all affect the distribution of manpower, but in a democratic society the final determinant of what any one person will do is that person himself. When too few persons choose to be teachers, the education of a whole generation may suffer. When too many persons prepare for a few popular professions and fail to find employment, precious human assets are wasted, and powerful future leaders begin to wonder about the political and economic systems under which they live.
Many investigators have observed the discrepancies between the occupational preferences of students and the occupational distribution of our employed population.
Occupational information is indispensable. One cannot choose what one does not know, and many occupations are unknown to most of us. One may stumble into an appropriate occupation by sheer luck, but the wise choice of an occupation requires accurate information about what occupations are available, what they require, and what they offer.
Occupational information alone is not enough. Knowledge and acceptance of one's own aptitudes, abilities, needs, limitations, interests, values, feelings, fears, likes, and dislikes are essential also, as is clear thinking about the relative significance of all the facts. None of these other considerations is any less important than occupational information.
It is obvious that knowledge of occupations can be effectively applied only when one knows something about oneself. It is equally obvious that knowledge of oneself can be effectively applied to the choice of an occupation only when one knows something about occupations. Either without the other is incomplete.
