Tag Archives for " career "

Apr 08

Empowerment or Endangerment?

By ZoWun | Career development

Do women feel pressured to ‘have it all’?

I recently heard Jane Caro on the ABC’s The Drum talking about ‘empowerment.’ She understood the concept to have become a stressor and an expectation – that to empower women (in particular) to have both a family and a career is to put undue pressure on girls to live up to high standards of a perfect family, a fabulous home, a great figure, volunteering in the community, and managing a successful career. In essence, she believes that through this concept of ‘empowering’ women to ‘have it all’ we are putting them in the position of feeling like they have to ‘earn the right’ to this and as a result, all being ‘empowered’ means is to feel totally exhausted as they struggle to juggle all the balls of life at once.

The response to this interview was widespread affirmation that women all over the country are experiencing this level of exhaustion as they balance the needs of home, work and (usually last on the priority list) their own health and wellbeing.

However, is this really the story of a person who is empowered?

To be empowered is to give someone the authority or power to do something on the one hand, but on the other, it means to make someone stronger and more confident, especially in controlling their life and claiming their rights. It appears that somewhere between these two arms of the definition of empowerment, we have lost our way. Just because we can do something, doesn’t mean we necessarily should. We are in a society where women can ‘have it all.’. However, there is a difference between empowering someone to have the choice to build a career and have a family, and expecting them to.

Just because we can do something, doesn’t mean we necessarily should.

Many of the clients that I see are women returning to work after they have started a family. It’s not ‘empowerment’ that drives them back to work. Usually, it is the need to put food on the table. In ‘Mum-land’ there is a lot of pressure to be the perfect parent: women appear to be excellent at shaming each other and it is a widely held fact that you literally cannot get it right whether you breast or bottle feed, use cloth or disposable nappies, dress your girl in pink or blue, co-sleep or let baby cry it out – everyone has an opinion and everyone believes their opinion is ‘truth.’ Whether a mother returns to work (and when she chooses to do so) does not escape this social scrutiny and the development of social media for 21st century mums only magnifies this scrutiny.

As individual as the choice to use cloth or disposable nappies is, so is the choice to return to work. This decision is metered by many factors including balancing the cost of daycare with the salary they will earn, investigating the value of returning to the world of adulthood and leaving the Wiggles behind for a few hours, and understanding the importance of continuing to build a career that means something to them. Socially speaking, people are going to judge you no matter what you choose: if you choose to stay home, you could be considered less valuable to society (even the government is known to support women returning to work – a working mum is a tax paying mum!) despite the fact that you are raising the next generation of Australians (a full time job in itself!). If you choose to go back to work, then you aren’t fulfilling the ideal model of motherhood because you are choosing to put the children in daycare and ‘not raise them yourself.’ This social judgment creates quite the conundrum that often pits mums against each other when we really need to be standing together and supporting each other.

At the end of the day, returning to work or staying home is a choice that you need to make based on what’s important to you and what your family needs. Trying to manage a perfect life is to succumb to social expectations and pressures. However, to feel confident in your decision, knowing that it is the right one for you and your family is to be empowered. What Jane Caro was describing was mummy guilt and overwhelm – to really be empowered, we need to be free to make our decisions outside of social pressures and away from Facebook.

Feb 28

Unemployment’s not so Black and White

By ZoWun | Employment/Career Statistics , Unemployment

“The measure of a society is found in how they treat their weakest and most helpless citizens.” 

Mahatma Ghandi

Last week, I wrote about numbers. About how underemployment is sitting at a 23-year high and trending up, how we have 1.1 million Australians looking for more work than they currently have, and how even the unemployment rate is significantly higher when you change the parameters of the survey from a person who hasn’t worked at least one hour in the previous month to a person not working and looking for work at some point over the previous month.

This week, I want to write about a common story found behind the numbers. For many of us, finding work in Australia is hard. As a society, we seem to have little patience for people experiencing unemployment or underemployment, and we base this on two things. Firstly, the assumption that finding work isn’t actually that hard because “I’ve never had any trouble”, and so by default, the unemployed person must be either too picky or too lazy to “get off their bum and get a job.” Secondly, that in some way, the unemployed person is beholden to us because “our taxes” pay their welfare.

I was stunned when I saw the responses on a local social media page when a woman sought advice regarding finding work here.

There was no consideration given for her qualifications, experience, her strengths and weaknesses, health or capabilities. No one even inquired about them. Every suggestion was menial and was often accompanied with a comment about how she should take whatever she could get.

There seems to be a widespread misunderstanding that if the job is unskilled, it’s easy to get.

There are a number of problems with this. Firstly, this advice is often administered by people who have been in the same job for decades or haven’t experienced unemployment, especially not long-term unemployment. The comments generally start with “I’ve never had a problem finding a job, you just have to get off the couch.” Therefore, it’s not coming from a place of experience or empathy, but of judgment. Secondly, menial and unskilled work is not actually easy to attain, especially if you have unrelated qualifications and a work history that doesn’t demonstrate the required skills. Even then, the willingness to undertake menial work does not necessarily lead to employment.

Unemployment is often a demeaning experience on its own, without the social media trolls coming out of the woodwork to tell them how easy finding work is and to get a job scrubbing toilets.

There seems to be a widespread misunderstanding that if the job is unskilled, it’s easy to get. A hirer in this situation is still doing risk assessments when it comes to hiring decisions and often being unsuitably, or over, qualified can be a huge disadvantage. Telling this woman that ABC company is looking for a concreter isn’t realistically helpful when she is a trained counsellor.

Unemployment is often a demeaning experience on its own, without the social media trolls coming out of the woodwork to tell them how easy finding work is and to get a job scrubbing toilets. Unemployment is the leading cause of poverty according to the Australian Council of Social Service. It puts people at a significantly higher risk of depression, which in itself impacts a person’s self-motivation, sense of intrinsic value and ability to engage with others. When this person actually reaches out and seeks help, only to be told that they aren’t trying hard enough, this advice compounds an already challenging and emotional situation.

Ghandi famously said: “The measure of a society is found in how they treat their weakest and most helpless citizens.” If this is the case, we are going to be found wanting. Out of the federal budget, the cost of welfare for the unemployed and sick is $10 billion a year – it costs us more to support families with children than it does to help those experiencing unemployment. Allow me to ask you, what is the cost of not helping them?

This article was first published in the Border Mail on February 27, 2018, and is republished here with permission from the Editor in Chief, Xavier Mardling.

Mar 01

Life can throw you a curve ball sometimes

By ZoWun | Career development

Life can sometimes throw the most unexpected curve balls. When I was a school kid (here, in Albury in fact), I can honestly say being a Career Development Practitioner was never my response to the question ‘what do you want to be when you grow up.’  It doesn’t seem to be the kind of career that a person aspires to as a child – it tends to be something we fall into along the path to other destinations.a

When I was in high school I wanted to be a palaeontologist – just like my 8yo son, I was fascinated with dinosaurs and loved learning about them, although to be fair, my 8yo would have put me to shame in a battle of knowledge of these prehistoric beasts! Then I wanted to be a sports journalist – I thought that travelling the world and being paid to watch sport was pretty much the best gig a person could imagine. Then I wanted to be a teacher. Given that both my parents were teachers, this is probably the most predictable outcome and off I went to university to study a Bachelor of Arts to be followed by a Diploma of Education.

But somewhere along the way I fell off the path well-planned and thought about post graduate studies and PhDs and the romance of studying in the UK so before I knew it, my Diploma of Education turned into an Honours year in History instead (studying witchcraft trials because there is such a calling for that sort of thing in the current labour market!) … and then I met a man in uniform. An Airforce uniform.

I ended up moving to Katherine in the NT for the most eye-opening, naiveté-stripping experience of my life at that point where my partner was stationed at Tindal before he got out of the ADF and we moved to Perth. I ended up working in the Public Sector and found my way into Recruitment where I discovered a passion for helping people find work.

And then I fell pregnant. Like many women, I felt that this meant my career was over, or at least my days where my career was so centrally placed in my life. Little did I know, that the birth of my son would also birth the opportunity to build the career I didn’t know I always wanted – the freedom to create my own path on a daily basis, limited only by my imagination (and capital!) and flexibility to allow me to attend my son’s school assemblies while also meeting my clients’ needs. They say when life gives you lemons, make lemonade, for me it was a case of when life closes a door, build another one.

This is an example of chaos, quite literally – the Chaos Theory of Career Development. My own experiences have taught me that it is important to have a plan, but it is even more important to be open to variations and tangents, opportunities and risks because our labour market is so changeable (and becoming more so) that we need to be able to adapt and change as the needs of the market evolve. With unemployment being so high in parts of Albury Wodonga, creativity and innovation in our approach to career development is vital to designing opportunities to build meaningful careers.

Self-employment might not be for all of us, but taking the approach that we are a company of one, that we are selling our brand to prospective employers creates a new perspective on the career experience that often makes us stand out from the crowd. Have you created a personal brand for yourself? What does it say about you? Do your social media profiles and career documents (such as your résumé and cover letter) reflect that brand?

We are in an era where innovation and entrepreneurialism is currency, but you don’t have to be an entrepreneur to innovate your career path. It’s all in the way we perceive ourselves and then portray our brand to those around us.

 

This article was first published in the Border Mail and is re-published here with permission.