SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA JOB MARKET : THE DRIVING FORCES : How to Make Work a Career--and a Career Work : People must discover what they’re good at and where they fit in--or if they fit in.

Carol Ditimus was just looking for a little extra Christmas money when she started working the counter at a Carl’s Jr. in Chula Vista in 1972. Today she’s a regional director in charge of 38 Carl’s Jr. restaurants and one step from a company vice presidency.

Somewhere along the way, Ditimus--a self-described “little miss nobody” who never went to college--discovered she had more than a job. She had a career.

“I had never thought about being anything but a store manager,” Ditimus, 38, recalled. “It just never occurred to me. But this has opened a lot of doors, self-confidence-wise, and now I’m sure there’s more I can do down the road.”

For many, the difference between toiling at a job and building a career is simply one of perspective.

“A career is really a state of mind,” said David Friedland, a Los Angeles industrial psychologist. “A person’s identity becomes tied up with a career--a person who just has a job doesn’t have that.”

But finding a situation challenging enough and satisfying enough to foster this crucial sense of identity is not simple. Building a career is a future-oriented undertaking, experts emphasize, and it’s important to keep an eye on the next step. Work can truly become part of one’s sense of self only if it has a long-term orientation.

How do you know if you have a job or a career? According to the experts, there are questions you can ask yourself to suggest the answer: Will doing the job well lead to opportunities for advancement and promotion? Does it offer the chance to learn skills that will be useful in a higher-level position? Have other people used the job as a springboard to bigger and better things?

“People should be asking, ‘Is the job going to lead to something, or are they just putting one foot in front of the other,’ ” said Tom Drucker, a Los Angeles consultant on human resource issues.

Career development specialists acknowledge that every worker’s path is different, but they cite several broad approaches to establishing a more rewarding career:

* Do what you love. The idea is simple, if widely ignored: Pick a field in which the inescapable daily tasks are to your liking.

* Become an expert. In the modern economy, specialized knowledge often translates to power and profit.

* Exploit your experience. Demands of the workplace are changing fast. Success awaits those who know how to apply past experiences to new situations.

* Commit to the company. The most traditional approach, it holds that hard work and loyalty ultimately will be rewarded.

Although Ditimus and many others have met success by committing to a company, job counselors say developing a career is often a more intricate matter than simply investing all ambition in a lone employer. In an era of mergers, acquisitions and cost-cutting, it can be unwise to count on a single firm for a lifetime career.

David Bowman, president of the Los Angeles-based Transition Group and co-author of a recent book on career change, advocates doing what you love as the key to a rewarding career.

“A career is play, not work,” Bowman said. “It’s something that you like to do, the kind of thing you migrate towards in your free time.” The critical first step in finding the right career, according to Bowman, is a careful self-assessment in which a person determines what he or she truly enjoys.

The results can be surprising. One of Bowman’s clients, Steven D. Cherney, worked in research and development at Procter & Gamble for 20 years, but it wasn’t until he quit the huge firm that he really found his career.

“I’d been bending over backwards to fit into a corporate environment, but I’m really a non-complier,” Cherney said in explaining why he’s so much happier as an executive recruiter with his own company than as a successful employee at Procter & Gamble.

When Cherney left P&G;, “it was like leaving my family,” he recalled. “I had grown up with the company, and I had no idea what the world outside was like.” But once he broke away, Cherney realized that the family had not nurtured him well. “It’s a very insulated environment there; it’s only when you leave that you realize how valuable you are,” he said. Many people could use such an eye-opening, Bowman said. “It’s better not to be loyal to a company, because they are not going to be loyal back,” he said. People should constantly evaluate their situation, he suggested.

Of course, if you’re not going to be loyal to a company, and you can’t figure out how to make your love of skiing into a career, then what? One alternative is to become an expert.

In other words, commit yourself to the field of labor relations or accounting or electrical engineering. Let that specialty--be it technical, managerial or professional--provide your career-forming identity and pay the bills, too.

One caveat: If you’re aiming for top management, advises Gary Kaplan, a Pasadena career counselor, you have to “get your ticket punched” in a lot of places; the broader the experience the better.

Eileen Brabender agrees. The Los Angeles career consultant recommends that every experience picked up in the course of a working life be tucked into a “suitcase” full of capabilities--and saved for later.

Sarah Harden never knew how well her suitcase was packed. When she graduated from college in the early 1970s with a degree in English, she took a job as a bank teller. As a woman without any professional skills, it seemed like the best of a limited number of possibilities. When it became clear after five years that she couldn’t get much past head teller, she moved on to a clerical job at an oil company.

After moving to California, Harden stayed in the oil industry. But finally, she said, “I decided to take control.” When personal computers were introduced into her organization, she leaped at the chance to master them.

The payoff came soon, when an old friend suggested she apply for a job as a proposal writer for Groundwater Technologies, an environmental cleanup firm.

That position, in which Harden is now happily ensconced, seemed to give some logic to everything she had done before.

The English degree had given her writing skills, the bank teller job had helped her develop basic business and customer relations skills, the oil company work had familiarized her with a lot of technical issues relevant to the problem of cleaning up pollution and her work with computers had given her some basic technical competence in that area.

“Developing a career is an ongoing thing,” she said. “Most of us need to be flexible and constantly adjusting our appraisal of ourselves. No matter what your background, you can find a niche for yourself.”

CAREER IDENTITY

A majority of people get a sense of identity from their job. But many others view work merely as something they do for a living. Here are the results of a survey in which people were asked how they viewed their job: Provides a sense of identity: 57% Just what they do for a living: 40% No opinion: 3%

Source: Gallup Poll of 796 adults nationwide, July, 1989.