The General Course Of Your Working Life

Throughout our working life, we meet both friends and enemies. We also often feel a certain competitiveness at work, we achieve multiple goals and we learn from our mistakes.

In addition, our work also offers us the opportunity to pursue our ambitions. Our work is an important part of our identity and our social environment and structures our lives. However, a career entails much more than that.

Our working life will be different throughout our lives depending on the stage we are in. In this article we take a closer look at some of the results of surveys and studies on the general course of working life.

You could say that this process generally has three stages: job search, finding and keeping a job and retiring.

The three stages of working life

Looking for a job

One of the primary goals of young adults is to find a job that allows them to be both productive and independent. In order to become as independent as possible, most young people aspire to the highest paying jobs. In contrast, for older adults who are already independent, satisfaction is often the primary goal.

Remember that there are many factors that influence the way people search for a job. One of the most important is the support one’s family provides.

This support can affect the way a person searches for a job both directly and indirectly. For example, direct influence is when someone from that person’s family helps them find a job by calling a few people. This can lead to a very specific worker role or status.

However, the family can also have an indirect influence. For example, by motivating and enabling the person to finish a good school or by promoting certain attitudes and behaviour.

A central aspect when it comes to job searches is social status. Research shows that families often pass on their social status to their children, which can have a major impact on their working lives.

Keeping a job

Once someone has landed a job, their goal shifts from getting a job to keeping the job or moving up the ranks in the company.

It is important to remember that people ‘s current working lives are much more unpredictable than they used to be. Young people today are therefore more motivated to change jobs.

There are two central aspects involved in the degree to which a person values ​​his or her work. These aspects then determine whether someone wants to keep their job or not. We are talking about the salary and the working environment.

Your salary is the extrinsic motivation your job gives you. While salary may be one of the most important things initially, over time it comes second for many people. The work environment, on the other hand, is the intrinsic motivation that your job gives you. It determines how satisfied someone is with their job.

After all, the ultimate goal of a job should be to enable someone to achieve certain productivity and quality of life goals. In the long run, a person’s work environment often has more to do with this than his salary.

Retirement: the end of working life

Every phase of life eventually comes to an end. In the case of working life, this is when one retires. Keep in mind, though, that retiring doesn’t have to be a shocking break from working life. Rather, it should be a transition.

There are three different ways to look at your pension:

• Honeymoon: The people who view retirement this way see it as an opportunity to do all those activities they’ve always wanted to do, but couldn’t do because they had to work. Now that they are retired, they have time to travel, gain new knowledge, discover new hobbies, etc. These people often retire voluntarily and happily. Moreover, they also have enough money to enjoy this ‘honeymoon’.

• Rest and relaxation: these people see it as an opportunity to relax and not have to think about the obligations that came with their professional life.
• Continuity: These people continue to perform the same activities after they retire as they did when they were working. This group includes people who were very satisfied with their work and who would like to continue doing this work. The difference is that they do not have the same obligations as before.

So, retirement may mean the end of working life, but not the end of life itself. Yet some people see it as a real life crisis. Instead, however, they should see it as a new phase of life full of new challenges and goals.