Adjusting Our Lives

The errors committed in choosing an occupation, and the resulting vocational maladjustment, can be largely traced to at least two sources. One is that young people confronted with an occupational choice are frequently ignorant of the conditions existing in the occupational world. They have little or no conception of the main types of work, or of the best qualifications required for this or that type of occupation.

Another source of error is that young people are victims of an unsound social attitude which glorifies “white collar” vocations, and regards as undesirable the occupations of a more laborious type. Innumerable thousands of youths persist in choosing the professions and clerical occupations in spite of preferences and pronounced capacities for other occupations.

The bulk of the work of the world has been and will be done by manual labor, however, and by relatively unskilled people. Against this prevalence of semi-skilled jobs, there is a counter-force, psychological and cultural in origin, namely, profound and widepsread unwillingness to do manual or routine work except of the white collar variety.

This willingness to do white collar work reveals an unconscious error in people’s attitudes. It is commonly assumed that a white collar worker is closer to opportunities for executive advancement: the desirable culmination of a white collar job.

VOCATIONAL LIFE TODAY

A more realistic view reveals a different picture. In modern conditions, the worker, whether in factory or store or office, may expect over a period of time rising wages, shorter hours, the elimination of much of the drudgery of labor and better working conditions; in general—a better economic life.

But he may also expect to be confronted with greater problems of adjustment, for the vocational world today is not a world of unchanging occupational caste with fixed, unvarying occupational careers.

Most likely, as technological improvements continues, it will be a world of kaleidoscopic change, demanding for success on the part of the worker a higher degree of the ability to adjust himself progressively to a continuously and rapidly changing situation.

People, so far as ability is concerned, are capable of doing a wide variety of things equally well; and with regard to abilities required, wide ranges of occupations demand combinations of ability. All in all, vocational life nowadays demands not one choice, not one decision, but a never-ending series of choices and decisions.

ABILITY AND JOB SUCCESS

For most of us, even for the five per cent of the population engaged in liberal professions, solving the vocational problem means getting jobs and making progressive adjustments to variable job situations. As a result, the proper emphasis with the majority of the people is upon preparing for a job of some kind or other, and not upon deliberate choice of an occupation with a promise of success in it.

A vocational choice, upon graduation from school or college, becomes for most young persons a choice of immediate training programs for one type of job or another. They have to focus their attention upon general vocational objectives in which they are concerned, such as their specific ability, economic demand, and the propensity to a mode of life implied in the given occupation.

Now, as to this last point, a desirable life pattern, such as a sedentary way of life, travelling, frequent contacts with people, etc., characterize whole occupational groups rather than individual occupations. One has to keep this in mind, when the economic situation within the chosen vocation is unfavorable, and an adjustment to a new occupation is called for.

No sooner is the training for a vocation finished than we are confronted with the choice of a job to apply for or aim at; later, the selection of another job, and even more jobs, and more problems and more decisions as long as we remain productive members of our vocational group.

SUCCESSFUL ADJUSTMENTS

Thus, once within an occupational group, the young person will change from job to job, or will advance from one to a higher one, largely not only because he has the aptitude or personality traits required, but because he has the ability to adjust himself to a changing situation.

For the majority of workers, in factory and office, promotion comes from within the regimented industry, rather than through individual success in any one narrowly limited trade. Consequently, granting other things being equal, the success of one individual rather than another will come through this capacity for self-adjustment.

Of no less importance are the adjustments in the functions of institutions which shape the individual’s destiny. They, too, have to keep pace with changing social conditions.

Success, for instance, in promising occupations of the future hinges upon the proper adjustment of the school programs with the view of developing the necessary abilities in personal and social relations. In any of the personal service occupations, which are big with promise, success presupposes, for that matter, ability for adjustment in personal and social situations.

TRAINING FOR SALESMANSHIP

Suppose that a great commercial or vocational high school should recognize that the occupations of typing and bookkeeping, though more easily taught, are more overcrowded and underpaid than the selling occupations. And that it would then undertake to prepare the majority of its graduates for careers of superior sales-people.

This would require, among other things, training in human understanding, self-control, personal insight, tact, courtesy, clearness and simplicity of statement, and other traits that go to make up a person with whom customers prefer to deal.

The school program, in addition, might have to provide for improvement of details of posture and bearing, voice and diction, as well as of the fundamentals of emotional control, appreciation of motives, and integrity in personal relations.

This education of the personality of the graduates would make them better equipped to enter the vocation of salesmanship, and numerous other occupations as well.