Would you step into your parents’ shoes?
A survey of teenagers shows that more than a third plan to follow the same career path as their parents. But it does not always work like that, say Tom Chivers and Sarah Durber.
TOM CHIVERS would have been a doctor – like his parents and their parents before them – until he realised how much work their profession entailed. When you are growing up, you vaguely assume you will follow in the ‘‘family business’’, on the basis that you don’t know anything else.
The only jobs you know are the ones your parents do and, since both my parents are doctors, I had sort of taken it as read that I would be a doctor too.
My dad’s dad was a medic; my mum’s family is stuffed full of doctors and scientists and researchers and so on; it seemed pretty inevitable.
My parents, on the other hand, knew that I probably would not follow in their footsteps.
They knew, which I did not until later, that you have to do quite a lot of work to get on to a medical degree course, rather than loafing your way through your A-levels, sporadically turning up to classes and hoping that a university will let you in afterwards, which was what I did.
But – apart from a brief period, aged about 9, when I decided I wanted to be a marine biologist because I liked sharks – in so far as I had aspirations at all, they were to be a doctor.
Whether or not all children feel the same I do not know. But growing up in north Oxford, about half my friends seemed to have doctor parents and most of them have followed obediently in the parental footsteps. Perhaps there is something different about a career such as medicine. It is all-consuming: one does not work as a doctor, one is a doctor; you do not switch it off when you leave the office. It is vital and respected. I have noticed no-one shouts: ‘‘Is there a comment and opinion writer in the house?’’ in an emergency.
And, unlike almost any other degree, gaining a medical degree pretty much dictates your job for the rest of your life.
Even lawyers sometimes wan-
Tom Chivers der off into other areas but medical students become doctors and most remain so until they retire.
I probably dodged a bullet: the hours my parents worked were and remain very long, and the responsibilities enormous.
They would leave home early, come home late and then, it seemed, work until midnight in their study every night. They certainly never suggested, in word or deed, they wanted me to don the family stethoscope and I think they were quietly relieved when, after university, I wandered first into academia and then into journalism. I am bookish and unserious; the handle end of a scalpel is no place for someone as easily distracted as I am.
There are times, though, when I wonder what it would have been like. If only so I could say at parties: ‘‘Yeah, I save lives’’, instead of ‘‘Um, I try to be funny in 600 words or fewer.’’
SARAH DURBER studied geography and worked in public relations before joining the family business in Spitalfields Market, working with her father.
Working with my father is in many ways a blessing; I don’t have to climb my way up the career ladder and I have guaranteed job security. But it is also harder than working elsewhere, because I have more to prove. There are 10 employees but there is more attention on me as the daughter of the boss, and I have the double pressure of trying to please my boss and my father. He is the best businessman I know and those are very big shoes to fill.
When I was a kid, my dad would leave the house at 1am and not return until 4pm. I never really understood what he did in his ‘‘secret’’ job.
Now that I work for him as a trade and sales manager, I feel like I have been let into the family secret. It is really exciting.
I help my father run Tropifresh, a fruit and vegetable wholesaler at New Spitalfields Market in London, which my dad started in 1983. He still works the same hours today. I come into work a little later, for 5am, but spend the first three hours of the day selling to customers, on the shop floor.
The rest of the day I work on accounts, checking invoices and orders, and on the new company website, which I set up when I joined the business. My father and I make a good team; we are able to tell it like it is to each other, in a way that people in normal bossemployee relationships cannot.
We can cross those boundaries and hash out issues. Having said that, we rarely argue.
I was 25 when I decided to join the family business. I had had jobs before, so I have always tried to maintain professionalism. In fact, I didn’t want to join Tropifresh without some sense of the corporate world first, to bring a fresh set of skills and experience.
After completing my geography degree at University College London in 2011, I worked in PR for a while, but it was during university that I developed a real interest in the business because I worked part-time for my father to earn some much-needed money. I eventually went on some business
trips with him and realised that the more I was exposed to the marketplace, the more I loved it.
A lot of my job involves developing the website – skills my father, as an old-school trader, does not have – so he trusts me to get on with it. However, if ever I have an idea about the business generally, I have to fight harder and louder than in my previous job to get him to listen to me.
He knows me inside out. I hope to take over Tropifresh one day.
My loyalty is to the business, rather than my father. He was actually surprised that I wanted to join – at one point he warned me against it, simply because of the long hours and hard work.
All of my friends have gone into more traditional jobs, such as medicine or accounting. But I have always known I wanted to be self-employed and the opportunity to expand the business is amazing; it is now up to me to make it work.