Lessons You Should Teach Your Kids About Career Moves

Teacher In Classroom, a photo by www.audio-luci-store.it on Flickr.

If you’re a parent, no doubt you’re taking stock of last year’s career milestones and you’re considering your goals for the year ahead with your family in mind. Beyond pondering how your career will affect your family’s schedule or how you’re going to pay for college, consider how the actions you take in your career decisions impact your children’s outlook on their own careers. Here are a few lessons worth imparting to your next generation of workers:

Remind them that the professional relationships they create in every job move will stay with them throughout their careers.  If a career is done right, whether you stay with one company for twenty years or you change jobs every few years, it’s important to forge relationships with colleagues early on. There will be mentors in your midst, mentees, and business visionaries who become our role models. Remind your kids that it’s okay to lean on these relationships in order to grow and learn. And during inevitable times of downsizing, these are the advocates who will champion for us when we require job leads, referrals or sound career advice.

There’s something to learn at every job—good or bad.  Don’t change jobs until you learn something.  The full lesson may not be completely clear until you are long gone from the situation, but don’t abandon a role without gaining some understanding of what made the situation fail. Toxic bosses teach you how not to lead. Benevolent mentors bowl us over with generosity and teach us to pay it forward in our next gig.

Whenever you can, participate in a variety of project teams.  Even if your kids decide to work for themselves, being a lone ranger is not a recipe for success. They will still need to collaborate with clients and vendors. They will rely on referrals and form partnerships. Experience from the collaborative effect of teams is a powerful lesson. Point out that there will be backstabbers and there will be cooperators on most teams—but it’s their decision whom to emulate.

A job’s not supposed to be fun—that’s why it’s called work; but try to have fun anyway.  If you make a conscious choice to enjoy some aspects of even the most mundane job, it will be more tolerable. All of us remember the worst job we’ve had, and hopefully over the years we’ve learned to laugh about it. Tell your kids that while they are looking for  better job, they should look for moments of job mastery, some level of autonomy, and opportunities to collaborate with good people in any role they have.

Whether you impart these lessons to your children in a formal conversation or not, you are always leading by example. If you are depressed by a long job search, show your kids where you’ve had a small win (a job lead through networking, a great conversation with an industry leader). Try not to wear a gloom and doom cloud over your head when you talk about the economy or the job market. Reminisce about the joy you’ve felt in your career in years past. Because whether you want to or not, you are planting the seeds for your children’s attitudes about work.