Career steering

A commenter over at Abagond was talking about career steering in a comment towards a racist who was showing their ignorance.

What is career steering?

Career steering is when someone tries to steer another person in a specific direction career wise.

This mostly pertains to race and/or financial situations, but often even happens within the family.

In fact, I have suffered more from the financial and family career steering than I have from the racial career steering.

There is a difference between someone mentioning the warnings and things to think about when choosing a career just to help you make sure you know what you want, and then there is trying to steer them away from something by encouraging other types of jobs, usually lesser than jobs that they feel "suit" your abilities better.

My mom has often career steered me and tried to give me warnings and things to think about. Hers comes from the financial fears. She fears there may not be a job out there for me when I am done with college. Its the loans that makes her scared (the same for me, plus her being ill and poor).

Her fears are legit...but at the same time her fears caused her to go beyond just trying to help me think about what I wanted to turning into career steering.

Needless to say, it worked twice.

I had wanted to be a fashion designer when I was 15 and 16. I took a sewing class, and realized I hated sewing and just liked drawing the clothes, so I gave up on that aspiration. I then started getting interested in being a wedding planner...but alas, my mom discouraged me.

I have the philosophy of "if others suffer, that means I will suffer b/c they are better than me, and if it happened to them, its gonna happen to me".

I am not a risk taker and I gave up that aspiration.

Right now I have settled for being a history teacher, even though I really don't care to teach war. I am into the Space Age, Flying (mostly commercial), and pop culture. I would really like to work in archival or in museums. I would even like to work in a library someday.

Many have asked me why I am getting a teaching degree since its not what my heart obviously wants.

Well there is a saying life...those who can't do, teach.

I want to work my way up, I want to at least get a degree that I could fall back on hopefully if I were to be unable to complete any other degree. I hope after getting my degree I could aim for a library science degree (which means I could work in a library), and then a masters degree in history and hopefully I could get into some kind of museum studies program when I am done.

I was lucky that not to many people have tried to career steer me, although I was career steered by a TA recently, not to go for a lesser job but to go for what I really wanted and that was to work in a museum (she herself found herself going back to school to become a historian).

But some people are not so lucky. I think what helped my case in high school was that I did pretty good (i was ranked 28 out of 341 people in my graduating class).

Blacks often find themselves being career steered, such as when you apply to a clothing store and they suggest you apply to a fast food joint instead. (this is more job steering)

But the worst kind of career steering is when it comes to the career you want to take in life and someone tells you that maybe you should think about something else.

As I said before, its one thing to be trying to help the person look realistically about something or to take certain things into consideration, but at the same time there is that fine line between doing that and then trying to tell them they are not good enough to do anything above a certain field.

I sometimes feel like I cannot be a history teacher because I am black, and whites don't want blacks teaching white history in school. Thats what makes me iffy about wanting to do something in the history field (whether its teaching or museums) because people will expect me to only do things relating to African American history.

I remember someone once told me, if you are successful in breaking the white barrier in the history field, you can be someone a black girl may be able to look up to someday....

Someone has to break the barrier right?