The 'perfect job' illusion

By Bianca Praino

May 2020

I conducted a careers appointment recently with a final year Engineering student who said they want to get a ‘proper job’.  On the same day, I spoke to a university graduate, currently working as a sales professional, also seeking a ‘proper job’ because their current one isn’t really what they want to do. 

These two instances reflect this wider trend I have noticed  where students and graduates carelessly throw around this phrase a ‘proper job’. I don’t mean to imply that they are doing this maliciously or even intentionally, but what makes it careless is the assumption that a 'proper job'  is a universally defined and understood term and that I, the 'expert’ am  one of many people who are meant to understand what you as students and graduates  mean by this when frankly, I have no idea.

So, dear students and graduates, of course I could assume that  what you mean by ‘proper’  is that you want a graduate, professional job, where you get paid a decent salary for what you want to do. However, instead, when  this phrase  is used in appointments, my red flags pop up (a lot of them) and I just can’t let it pass as my curiosity gets the better of me and I have to ask  you to tell me what you mean by a ‘proper job’ because really, you are the expert on that, not me.  I for sure can't read your mind.

For some people, an artist isn’t a proper job, neither is a musician or dancer.  Tell this to those who have made a living out of a career in the creative industries. Gillian Lynne, Andrew Lloyd Webber, John Lennon to name a few.  I sometimes wonder to myself in these situations if you think my job  is a ‘proper’ job . I refrain from asking this though. Not quite sure I want to hear the response to that question. The point here is that, once I have asked students in the past to describe their definition of what a ‘proper job’ is, they just don’t know where to start but it is a very powerful question, which urges them to start to  reflect and think of this. Opens a whole can of worms and encourages them to rethink and reframe their next step.  It's a special moment for them.

Funnily enough, when I looked up the definition of ‘proper’, the Collins dictionary amongst others does actually use a sentence relating to jobs , for example,  ‘Two out of five people lack a proper job’ and the oxford online dictionary uses the sentence, ‘She’s never had a proper job’.  This I clearly found shocking and  doesn’t really help illustrate  my point or discourage people to generalise and assume the universality of the phrase. However, the dictionaries also list synonyms for proper, such as real, genuine, orthodox, and conventional. I would argue that these words are highly subjective as well as being socially and culturally relative. So this does help illustrate my point. Yay!

Had I put the two individuals described above in the same room, the final year student could have gained some insight from the graduate  about how important it is to know what you want from a professional role and  a 'proper job', and the graduate may have realised how far they have already progressed in their career since they graduated instead of focusing on what they haven’t achieved yet.   

Most importantly, these two individuals would have had to acknowledge that a ‘proper job’  is subjective and unique to them.

So the next time you hear someone using the term ‘proper job’, please ask them what they mean by a ‘proper’ job. Have a conversation about it  and don't take what they say on face value or assume what they mean. You are not expected to read their mind, and generating these types of career conversations encourages self reflection about what your definitions are.

Thanks for reading.

Ciao for now!

Bianca