Career options

Could it be that high school guidance councilors are falling down on the job? Are they steering people away from good options?

Thursday my lovely wife and I drove over to Vermont to listen to the Patrick Ross Band. They are on all the streaming services. We’ve known Patrick and his wife Cindy for years. We went to their wedding.  One winter they house sat for us. He’s making a decent living as a full time musician.

In fact, we’ve a number of friends making a full time living as musicians. Guidance councilors never tell someone to follow that career path. They also don’t tell people they can be artists or writers. However, I’m friends with at least a dozen people who make all or significant parts of their income from those professions. 

We don’t live in a major arts city. Most of those creative people have backgrounds in blue collar towns.   None of them are pampered trust fund people. None of them were told by guidance councilors to follow artistic careers. Good thing they follow their own passions.

-Sixbears

Job Security

On the wall in my home office is an old cartoon. A young man is working on a computer. His hippy parents suggest he should learn the guitar so he'll have something to fall back on. The cartoon works because it turns the old job security idea on its head. People who follow creative pursuits were often encouraged to have a “real” skill to fall back on.

I graduated from High School in 1976. We didn't know it yet but the world economy had changed. As luck would have it, all these years later, a lot of my creative friends are making a living. Many of the ones who took conventional career paths lost their jobs.

Back in the day there were two basic paths. If you did not go to college there were good paying jobs in the mill. It was good enough for our fathers and grandfathers. The other common path was college and a steady corporate job. Of course there were more options, but if you showed up at the guidance councilor's office you wouldn't think so.

Well, the good mill jobs went away so the blue collar guys didn't fare very well. Their jobs had provided good livings: a house, cars, boats, snowmobiles, and maybe even a camp on a lake. Nothing solid replaced that. Many of those people lost everything. Some even committed suicide. Some committed slower suicide using drink and drugs.

The college guys often didn't do as great as planned either. A lot of those good corporate jobs went away too. Some had their steady jobs replaced by contract work. People made a living, but they had to work harder at it than their parents did.

A friend of mine had gone to college to study plastics. He even managed a crew in a plastics company for a time. For the last couple of decades he's been making a living with his guitar. Another guy is a struggling artist. Work is hand to mouth, but he has a house and a downtown studio. I'm also connected to a lot of writers. Not all are full time, but many have turned their writing into a decent second job.

As hit or miss as creative jobs can be, they aren't outsourced to China. Nobody wants to go to a bar to see a Chinese guy play guitar over Skype. Some things just have to be live.

I'm not sure what future jobs will look like, but I'm guessing today's guidance councilors are still giving bad advice.

-Sixbears

The Working Nomad

There's a perception that only those who've retired can live a nomadic lifestyle. There certainly are plenty of those who retire, trade their house for a big RV and hit the road. Then there are those who've found a way to be nomadic and make a living along the way.

My lovely wife and I once met a couple who were living in a big 5th wheel. Both of them were musicians. They had a deal with a big RV campground chain. In exchange for a performance at the campground they would receive two free weeks of camping. For other expenses, they'd work gigs in whatever area they happened to be in. His wife had a small glass shop in the back of the trailer. She sold her artistic creations at campgrounds and though other outlets.

Traveling artists of all sorts are common: musicians, writers, painters, craftspersons, strippers, and street performers.

Then there are those who work in construction jobs: carpenters, masons, electricians, plumbers, oil field workers, and so on. The jobs tend to pay well, but are for a limited period of time so a lot of workers live out of RVs and trailers. I've even met one guy who traveled from job site to job site on a bicycle and lived in a tent. He'd just traveled from North Carolina to the Florida Keys to do highway construction.

I know of a couple small business owners who run their companies by remote control. They are in contact with a their managers through the Internet, skype and by phone. Both these businessmen are on the road for about 6 months of the year. The other 6 months they are more hands on with their operations.

Sailors too have found ways to live on a boat and earn as they go. It ranges from working temporary jobs in different ports to performing services for other boaters like boat repairs. Of course there's the whole range of artistic endeavors that can be done from a boat as well as on land.

Being a nomad is not just for the wealthy retired.

-Sixbears