The Introduction

When you are in primary school your teachers ask you ‘what do you want to be when you grow up’ Many kids answer with society correct answers like ‘a doctor’ or ‘a policeman’ and bless their hearts many of them go on to do just that. Either because they just ‘knew’ or gifted with a lack of imagination and a hankering for a uniform, they figured this was as good a career path as any.


My answer on the other hand was ‘lollipop lady’. I’m not sure what I thought that entailed but who doesn’t love a lollipop and hell, I’m a sucker for a good alliteration (pardon the pun). I was shattered years later to find out that being a lollipop lady (the person that holds the stop/go sign at the children’s crossing) was in fact a volunteer job and possibly not the best profession to pin my career hopes on...

So childhood aspirations firmly trampled, I set out to find a career through trial and error rather than through a misguided uniform fetish. This has led me to among other things, being a customer service representative, a data entry operator, a corporate response writer, an advertising executive, a receptionist, an accounts person, a fruit picker, a waitress, a tree planter, a labourer, a hospitality manager, a freelance writer, a cook and a candlestick maker.

Well ok, candlestick maker was a slight embellishment but you get my drift. None of these jobs however has inspired me into making a career of it. In this day and age, the pressure to have a career is huge but no one seems to care about whether you actually like it or not. And I wonder, how did these society model children know they wanted to be a doctor? Playing with a plastic stethoscope isn’t exactly qualitative research now is it?

So I started thinking... what if you could actually try out all these professions for a day? What if you could fast track past the 6 years at university or the 4 year apprenticeship and just get a taste of it and see how you liked it before walking boldly down the career path.

I know I know, it’s not a new concept, it’s called work experience and we all get pulled aside in year 10 to do a week of it at a rate of $5 a day. My particular experience was at a women’s hospital where for a week I learnt about haemorrhoids and the extreme ankle bloating experienced during pregnancy. Needless to say doctor, nurse and midwife were notable omissions from my career dabbling until now. So there I was, work experience done and left to my own devices to find a fulfilling career. Well I didn’t and I haven’t, until now...


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