The Southern California Job Market : Making It Work : ESSAY: From the Cocoon of a Job--Poof!--a Career Emerges

A while back, something called “Take Our Daughters to Work Day” was declared. The idea behind this was sort of a grown-up show and tell, inspirational and educational at the same time.

It was supposed to convince daughters that their parents have a Job to Do, which is important in the overall scheme of things and might be fun too.

All right, it was a gimmick. Mothers of sons groused that it may as well have been called “Leave Our Sons at Home Day.”

But what this particular gimmick set out to do was encourage girls--maybe next year it will be boys--to seriously consider a career, as opposed to a job.

Talk about coming a long way.

When I was a girl, the notion that women were destined only for marriage and motherhood was already passe. I never gave it a serious thought; my own mother worked for wages. Still, the nuances of the working world were a bit foreign. My parents never explained, for example, about this jump from job to career, or why one should bother to jump at all.

So now that I’m on the other side of the generational divide, I think, finally, that I understand the leap. This is what my parents should have told me back then.

See (they might have explained), if you’re lucky enough to have a choice, a job is something you do when you are not Serious. A job is something you can skip to, or walk away from, just because you feel like it. (Like when I quit my job selling Kentucky Fried Chicken because I was tired of coming home smelling like a drumstick.)

But a job can also be a blast, they would have said. It can lead to nowhere, and nobody--including you--cares. A job eats up your time and then gives you some money in return, except that the money tends to be spent on things like CDs and Snickers and a wild paint job for your car. (Or, OK, the rent, but that gets into a grown-up realm.)

Jobs are something all kids should go through while they are finding themselves and eating fast food and going out with people just because they like the way they dress.

So if a job is a date, a career is more like tying the knot. And you should definitely date before marriage. Try out some jobs in different fields before you settle down.

Then, as your parents always said, you’ll find one that’s right. That’s when your on-the-job attitude will start to change. It doesn’t actually matter what the job is. You’ll think maybe it could work out, shall we say, into something Long Term.

You’ll think about this job begetting another (but better) one, and another, and maybe another after that.

It goes something like this. You start working at the florist shop after school, start making special arrangements and customers notice your touch. A competitor hires you away, and before too long, you get backers to open your own shop.

And by now, you’ve got a resume (very careerish). Before you know it, you might as well be married with kids, in a manner of speaking. Committed, in other words. You’ve got a career!

Oh, nobody’s ever come out and said that careers are better than jobs. But in the argot of responsible parenthood (circa 1994), you bet we’re telling our kids they are. A career, we convey in words or in attitude, is something they should have. Or maybe that they must have.

People are always wanting to know if you have one, or why it is that you do not. A career is not just a series of jobs. It is a definition of who you are. (Florist: Creative. Intuitive. A green thumb. Good with plants, cash.)

Which, clearly, if phrased in the right way, is something that children of all ages can relate to. Nobody ever asks a kid what job she wants to do when she grows up, or at least nobody should.

It is being that is all-important to a child, as in “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

This is not the stuff of toil but of transformation: caterpillar to butterfly, ugly duckling to swan. The word job would definitely spoil the dream.

So when asked correctly, the question “What are you going to be when you grow up?” usually elicits responses that follow familiar paths.

They are going to be a) President of the United States, b) a ballerina, c) a firefighter or d) none of the above, because they are not planning on growing up.

My 7-year-old daughter, incidentally, volunteered “d.”

This is why I didn’t bother involving her in “Take Our Daughters to Work Day” last year. I figured it was a waste of time, hers and mine. I can see she’s already considering a career like her mom’s.