I have never been a career minded girl. Not that I haven’t dreamed big. I certainly have and continue to see my life in ways that are big. But, I have never dreamed to work in a particular field or a for a particular firm or Association and devote my life to it. As a young girl, when all my friends were going off to college to become this or that… I….. dreamed of marriage, children, roots… I knew that money would be a needed thing, but even then I somehow knew, or foolishly believed that there was “nothing” I couldn’t do, and that there was little I wouldn’t do, to make ends meet. While I did go off to college and complete the body of work required to get a piece of paper, it wasn’t the thing that drove me.
I am perhaps the worst person one should get to talk to kids, if the end goal is to get them off to the university, because my feelings haven’t much changed. People look at my resume and see that i have popped in and out of careers and jobs, and I have had fun doing it. I have found success in the strangest of places. Often times I hear that companies wont like my resume because it is too…. spotty.. My response is, then I wouldn’t want to work for them anyway…. So, I get that some view me as a career rebel.. And, I am ok with that. Life has worked out for me okay.
Yet, I have friends, successful friends who dreamed a career dream, and went on to University in order to achieve them, snagged the dream job and worked for them 25 plus year…. did things just the way the career world says you should… and then out of nowhere, literally out of nowhere is treated as if none… or little of the last 25 years mattered.
I don’t know about you, but for me, a company that is customer supported, at the very least, has an obligation to treat their employees with the same amount of loyalty they have required by their employees as well as their customers, right? I literally sit and wonder what the conversation in a company board room looks and sounds like as they collectively decide to take a persons dedication, loyalty, hard word and sacrifice and decide to flush it.
For career renegades like me, I know that I get what I get. I made that choice living life the way I have chosen to live it. I am cocky enough to know that I am good at what I do, and they can take me or leave me… and lucky for me 9 out of 10 employers hire me to do the job they need done… and then knowingly nod their head when I hand in my resume needing a new kind of challenge. It is a dance we both know….
But, even to me… watching a company disrespect their greatest commodities, it just…. well, there is truly no words to really describe it. Although, words like stupidity, suicide, profound lack of vision, are just some of the things that come to mind. It seems to me that a company is only as good as it’s current leadership. That all that they have been. All that they have built in their way of reputation gets flushed right down with their discussion to dishonor those that have helped them build to their current heights.
While I am aware that the world around me has changed and that “leave it to beaver” is no longer the standard we live by, I am still find it sad that companies forget that that those that have sacrificed so much, believing in the cause in which they built their careers around, are the best commodity that the company has and how they treat them shows who exactly the company has become.
I guess perhaps it is wrong for me to expect more. Yet, I do. I especially do when I watch those that have scarified so much working a career like a cause. What ever happened to the coveted gold watch?
A Cowgirl Called 