What’s the difference between a career, a job, and work?

What is a career?

‘Career’ is a word we use to describe the jobs and work we do throughout our lives. It comes from an old word for ‘chariot’, and can also be used to describe forward movement (as in, the car careered off the road).

In the past, the only people who had a career were those lucky people who had choice over what they did, such as men who worked in management. Back then, a career was seen as something that moved forward in a pretty predictable way – as long as you turned up and did your job, you could expect to be promoted in due course. Other people (like women, factory workers, minorities, and those with less money) were unlikely to have a ‘career’ – instead they would have ‘jobs’, which didn’t have clear paths for advancement.

Now, we know that those straight and shiny careers are actually the exception, not the norm, and that people could only have them because they relied on others in their lives to do everything else (like raise kids, clean the house, cook meals, and plan holidays).

Basically, your career is your journey through jobs and work over your lifetime. And it’s unlikely to look like a straight line – there will be times when you make great leaps forward, but there will also be times when you seem to stand still, or even go backwards. But this is all totally normal!

If you move into another field entirely then you may feel that you have ended one career and started another – we call this a ‘career change’.

What’s a job?

A job is a much more static than a career: it’s a set of tasks that you perform on a regular basis in return for a set benefit. To move forward in your career, you may be promoted from one job to another, or find a job somewhere else – the job itself is static, while you move around.

As an example, you may have a career in nursing, but your current job is a ward nurse in the respiratory unit of your local hospital. In future, you could move into a job as a nursing unit manager, or a job as a research nurse. Your career will still be in nursing (or another health related field), but your job will change.

So, what’s work then?

We use the word ‘work’ to refer to something that we need to do. This means it’s an activity that serves a purpose – it isn’t just something you want to do. You can also want to do it, but it must meet a need. Your job is a form of work – if you weren’t paid, then you wouldn’t turn up.

Most people think of work as something they do in return for money, but there are other things we do that count as work that won’t earn you a cent. It’s just easier to track and measure paid work, so that’s what most people (including the government) focus on.

Unpaid work includes caring for family members, cleaning and maintaining your living space and clothes, managing your professional networks, and even growing your own food. But just because something doesn’t have a monetary value doesn’t mean it’s valueless – all of these things are important in different ways, and in many cases are things we couldn’t survive without.

Why is this important?

How you see your work, job, and career can have a big impact on how successful you feel. For example, parents who have to spend time out of the work force to care for their children may feel less successful than their peers who can work full-time without distractions, but they only feel this way because they don’t count all their unpaid caring work as ‘work’.

We know that earning lots of money or climbing the corporate ladder doesn’t necessarily lead to happiness, so re-framing what you think of as ‘success’ could be a good idea.

The world of work is changing, and those shiny, linear careers we spoke about earlier have largely disappeared, so if you can reset your thinking before you’ve even begun your journey, you’ll be more prepared for the ups and downs when they appear.

Find out more

Looking for more resources on careers, jobs, and work? You can read heaps of other blogs and find inspiration on our website here.