Work for society and find passions elsewhere
It’s the busiest time of year for the job recruitment sector. After holiday breaks full of reflection and family time, many people return to work with a desire to better align their employment with their values or lifestyle needs. This annual spike in job vacancies has been exaggerated by The Great Resignation, a global trend inspired by pandemic burnout and multiple lockdowns which has seen a record number of job resignations, especially among mid-career employees. In one New Zealand survey, 46 per cent of people were keen to change jobs.
As we collectively realign our employment to better meet our changing needs, the catch cry of career counsellors throughout the Western World is remembered: follow your passion. It is the advice given by most teachers, kaumā tua, and mentors; it is what I have often encouraged in my older children.
But I wonder whether it’s time we considered changing our tune. As the pandemic reconfigures the labour market for what could be many years to come, maybe it’s time to park passion and guide current and future workers towards the jobs that really need our skills.
There is a growing mismatch between what our labour market needs and the realisation of our individual dreams.
Erin Cech, in her book
argues that the labour market was not designed to be a place to grow our passion projects, but to advance profit and capitalist interests. This incongruence, she says, means that some workers will be able to align their personal goals with their professional ones, but that many more will not.
Those who cannot are already disadvantaged by race, socio-economic, and gender divides.
Cech explains that ‘‘to presume that the best way for everyone to make career decisions is to follow their passion is to belie the deep inequities that are embedded in the modern labour market in terms of who has the ability to actually parlay their passion into some kind of gainful employment’’.
Further, if we remain theoretically committed to ensuring people can follow their dreams through employment, we must accept that the labour market will always have skills shortages. There will always be fewer people who are impassioned about pouring concrete and cleaning motel rooms than those who strive to teach history, design buildings, or create music.
Or – and this seems to be where we have landed – we encourage only a smaller, elite portion of the workforce to be passion-seekers, assigning the disadvantaged rest to fulfil the economy’s increasing demands for delivery drivers, baristas, and warehouse workers.
Following the passion principle, therefore, means we are perpetuating existing inequities in the labour market.
On an individual level, there are many reasons people take jobs – money, ease of access, professional development, convenience, a sense of duty, friendly co-workers. Passion need not be at the heart of which career we choose.
Aformer CEO of a multinational employment agency who recently migrated to New Zealand got one of her first local jobs directing traffic in a car park at a large event. She enjoyed the same control over the traffic flow as she’d had with her 80 staff.
Her rationale for accepting such a job was to build up the work experience in New Zealand that recruiters said she needed.
If our end game is broad, we will all take on roles that may not feel passionately aligned, but that serve some greater goal. And if our current job isn’t directly helping us to realise our personal dreams, other activities in our lives can bring a fuller sense of purpose and enthusiasm.
Cech encourages us to think about our relationship to work as allowing us to find other interests and projects so that we don’t rely solely on our jobs for our sense of identity.
Family, volunteer work, an art, a sport, or a higher cause can motivate and fulfil us outside working hours, creating the life of our dreams through a broader range of touchpoints, not just work.
Many of us see the people and interests in our lives as our inspiration to deal with customer calls or to sort aubergines at work.
Perhaps the best we can hope for is that we find a workplace that, in addition to providing a decent wage, gives us a sense of dedication and wellbeing.
If our end game is broad, we will all take on roles that may not feel passionately aligned, but that serve some greater goal.