# 1.2 What is a ‘career’?

Understanding the key terms in CEG is vital to understanding your role in it. Very few students go into full-time jobs at 16 and the concept of ‘career’ as a job for life is irrelevant to the twenty-first century labour market. Click on 'View document' below to read a careers overview, which explores this further.

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A more useful concept of career is a person's pathway through learning and work. Planning that journey should start in lower secondary school at the latest, when students have to make subject and course choices. They need to make choices that reflect their interests and strengths, while making sure they don't close any doors to possible future pathways. They will need your help, whether in formal careers lessons, in one-to-one guidance interviews, in preparing for work experience, or just in a passing question as they go out of the door at the end of a lesson or during a tutor period.

Now look at Activity 1.

## Activity 1

This is best undertaken with a group of colleagues. Record a short extract from any well known soap or drama, e.g. Casualty, The Bill. Then, with colleagues:

- List the jobs you see being performed.

- Which have the longest training, and which the shortest?

- Which allow for a relaxed and interesting lifestyle? Which ones do not?

- Which jobs would you say are ‘careers’ and which are ‘just a job’?

- Consider how you would define the terms: job, occupation and career? How do they compare with the definitions given in ‘Key terms from careers education and guidance’ in the link below?

Click 'view document' below to read 'Key terms for careers education and guidance', which may also be useful.

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OpenLearn - Careers education and guidance
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