Ready or Not, Here Life Comes - Softcover

How Startup Adults Get Unready for Careers

I do not think I knew what to expect [in the transition from school to work]. I always worked during high school; I always worked and made money. My parents made sure I went to work, but at the same time I was spoiled rotten growing up, so I never really had an idea. It was harsh, a big change to leave the nest and get into the real world and have to take care of everything. I wasn't prepared for what things cost, the value of the dollar, the things you could and could not do.

S.R., age 27

Lives flow with heavy undercurrents, much like the open sea; they undulate through well-timed waves, such as the preschool period, adolescence, and the so-called golden years of late life. Each arriving era brings its special challenges and opportunities, along with its unique stresses and pressures. A person may or may not be equipped to ride the next wave, to manage the requirements -- obvious and hidden -- of his or her latest time of life.

A particularly challenging period is the opening stages of a life at work, the school-to-career years, a time that, although rarely thought of as distinct, may be one of the roughest to traverse. These are the startup years, a pivotal time that claims more than its share of unsuspecting victims. In fact, most people are better prepared for their retirement than they are for the startup of their working lives! For some the startup years commence at age sixteen or seventeen, upon their dropping out of high school. For others the startup may not begin until age twenty-nine, following a residency in plastic surgery.

Many individuals in and around their twenties come to feel abandoned and anguished. They start to question their own self-worth, and they are prone to some awful mistakes in their choice of career or in the ways they perform as novices on the job. They suffer from an affliction I call work-life unreadiness, which may have its onset right after high school, in college, during the job search, or during the early phases of a job or a career.

The length of the startup period varies from just a few years to a decade or more of uncertainty and justified anguish. Some emerging adults take longer to start up a stable work life than do others. Some never stop starting; they can't move ahead toward a career because of repeated false starts or because they keep changing course. They start up and stall out! Others feel stymied in their work choices, while some of their friends effortlessly and expediently move into job roles that fit them as snugly as their favorite athletic socks.

Clearly, work life is not one's only life! Family life, perhaps spiritual life, sex life, social life, along with assorted other slices of life operate in concert and sometimes in conflict with work life. But work life is the subject of Ready or Not, Here Life Comes. To a large extent people are what they do. But we must remember that life at work is influenced by and influences numerous facets of day-to-day existence.

We are in the midst of an epidemic of work-life unreadiness because an alarming number of emerging adults are unable to find a good fit between their minds and their career directions. Like seabirds mired in an oil spill, these fledgling men and women are stuck, unable to take flight toward a suitable career. Some are crippled before they have a chance to beat their wings; others have tumbled downward in the early stages of their trajectories. Because they are not finding their way, they may feel as if they are going nowhere and have nowhere to go.

I have listened to the laments and noticed the moistened eyelids of promising young people who at age eighteen, twenty, twenty-one, or twenty-nine have no idea what they want to make of their work lives. Some may be too accustomed to having their activities explicitly spelled out and scheduled for them and as a result are having trouble making their own significant decisions. Others may have known what goals they wanted to pursue, but then their occupational pot of gold lost its allure; the romance of big business, engine repair, law, or academic life turned out not to be as advertised. Work was no fun; or it was repetitious ("boring"); or it entailed handling heaps of minutiae and menial tasks -- grunt work. Maybe it called for far too much playing up to people these young adults did not particularly like or respect. As one person we interviewed put it, "I do not think you can be prepared for the transition. No one can tell you what it is like to get up at eight every day and go to work every day to scratch out a living so you can have forty-eight hours on the weekend to do what you like, when you've had twenty-one years of doing what you want!" Any earlier idealism has given way to disillusionment.

Some anxious junior staffers may have chosen their particular roads for all the wrong reasons. Some embarked upon a career odyssey without fully understanding what that journey was destined to be about. No one told them what dental school or dental practice truly entailed; or if it was explained to them, perhaps they were not ready to hear it. Other young adults find themselves bound to an occupation from which they'd like to bail out, but they feel chained to their entry positions. Perhaps the pay is good, or backtracking would be too hard and risky, or nothing else looks any better. Finally, there are those unqualified for the peculiar rigors and aches of their grown-up work. It may be that their current abilities have failed to match their present interests. You're in for some trouble if whatever you like to do most you do poorly. Some people have strengths they're not interested in exploiting and interests that bring out all their weaknesses.

In all these instances, years of schooling and parenting have entirely missed that elusive target, work-life readiness. Our graduates may well lack the practical skills, the habits, the behaviors, the real-world insights, and the frames of mind pivotal for career startup. Their parents and teachers have unwittingly let them down. Adulthood has ambushed them; its demands have taken them by surprise. Nevertheless, time won't stand still: Ready or not, here life comes!

Their Earlier Lives

Individuals who find themselves gridlocked during the transition to adult work have come to these frustrating impasses from various directions. A lot of them were impressive students, pelted with ego-intoxicating kudos for displaying the dubious but much-revered trait of well-roundedness. These golden girls and boys -- ultracool, in the adolescent sense of the word, academically successful, athletic, politically astute, and attractive -- were apt to tumble from these pedestals. Their very versatility helped to make it hard for them to commit to the deep and narrow grooves of adult work life. Others suffered with neurodevelopmental dysfunctions that made school a perpetual come-from-behind battle, as they fought to satisfy elusive academic, athletic, or social demands. Many were well behaved and compliant kids, able to meet expectations as long as the demands were explicitly framed. Some were industrious, while others did poorly in school and became accustomed to failure. Whether their earlier life histories were comfortable or difficult, these neophyte adults now feel dazed and understandably apprehensive.

Has this predicament always plagued the members of this age group? Or are we encountering a growing proportion of unhappy wanderers? No doubt, the transition to adult work life is one of life's most daunting periods. But I have a strong sense that our population of career-unready adults is expanding, and doing so at an alarming pace -- like a contagious disease.

The Backdrop: Contemporary Influences on Work-Life Readiness

The culture of the modern world affords multiple ways to get lost or ambushed along the work-life trail. More than ever before, young adults are apt to confront job descriptions that are strikingly different from those familiar to elder members of their families. Role models within a family are an endangered species. Even if a young person breaks into the identical occupation as his mother or father, the chances are that its current routines and requirements look nothing like those his parents faced. Practicing medicine or law or tending to the family farm is a whole different ball game these days. Meanwhile, new adults have to face an economic world as unfathomable as it is unpredictable. How does a startup adult go about seeking job security amid today's foggy employment forecasts? Not very well.

We also live in a time when many mothers and fathers are downright fearful of their own kids, especially their adolescent offspring. Adolescents often hold the power in a family because they have so many weapons at their disposal (such as drugs, alcohol, tattoos, anorexia, suicidal thoughts, dropping out). Parents can't help dreading that their relationships with their kids may become increasingly brittle as children grow up. This fear may in part stem from a feeling of guilt that both parents are working and worry that they are not devoting sufficient attention to their children. Some parents may long so desperately for the approval of their children that they go out of their way to make sure their kids are being entertained at all times and sheltered from adversity or hardship of any sort. For example, if their child is having a hard time with a particular teacher, a parent is apt to call the principal or intervene in some other way and solve the messy problem for the child. Then the student is deprived of the opportunity to learn the strategic skills of conflict resolution, stress management, negotiation, and problem solving, all of which are essential in a career.

Many children and adolescents are not equipped with a durable work temperament, having been submerged in a culture that stresses instant rewards instead of patient, tenacious, sustained mental effort and the ability to delay gratification for the sake of eventual self-fulfillment. Additionally...