The current decade has seen a boom in the job sector, with several people choosing to fly solo with highly personalized career options that allow them a flexible work schedule. The rise of the Internet culture has also provided them with the tools to do so, with sites like WordPress and Tumblr to set up blogs and social media sites like Instagram and Facebook to find a follower base.
However, there are people who still choose to pursue more traditional career paths- teaching, government jobs, corporate jobs, joining the armed forces, engineering, medicine, etc.
These career options were seen as the logical route to take and were considered to be quite prestigious. And while these jobs continue to be sought-after, they are mainly seen as a source of security rather than passion.
It has become a common adage of Indian parents that one must first complete their studies and get a “stable” job to support themselves before thinking of veering off the beaten track and pursuing their passion.
In fact, several enterprising Indians have followed this example.
Enterprising Indian Women
1. Saanya Bajaj Rawat, a Wellington-based blogger, is actually a qualified lawyer. However, she has now built a successful career as a travel and fashion blogger, with her primary tools being Instagram and WordPress.
Under the handle ‘ThatOrdinaryCouple’, she charts the daily life of herself and her army officer husband and has hundreds of followers.
2. Shubhra Chadda, the founder of Chumbak, gave up her job as a marketer with NetApp to pursue her passion for quirky and cool novelty and daily use items, and thus one of India’s most loved kitsch stores was born.
3. Richa Kar, the founder of the online lingerie store Zivame, is armed with an engineering degree from BITS Pilani and a masters degree from Narsee Monji Institute of Management Studies.
She chose to set up a highly successful e-commerce business (a fairly new sector), making life easier for hundreds of Indian women who are uncomfortable shopping for innerwear in person, and providing them with a wide range of carefully-sourced products.
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Stable, But Not Permanent
According to the DNA India survey of 2016,
60% of people working in “traditional” sectors of employment have reported high levels of dissatisfaction with their jobs.
Most of them stay on in their positions for the sake of a dependable salary and job security, and 80% of people employed in white collar jobs have been reported as wanting to quit their jobs once they have enough resources to pursue their dreams without financial insecurities.
Of course, there are people who are very happy with their traditional jobs, but a rising number of millennials (44%, according to the 2014 survey by Times of India) see their traditional jobs as a mere stepping stone to greener pastures.
There are people in traditional jobs who don’t have plans to branch out on their own, too, and they tend to feel that they are stuck with the short end of the stick, with a whopping 60% admitting that they have high levels of dissatisfaction with their jobs.
It is imperative to note that this trend is on the rise in recent years, according to research conducted by HRINASIA.com.
The previous generation in the same fields of employment reported higher levels of job satisfaction, and often stuck to their jobs till it was time to retire, not wanting to use it as a stepping stone to another career path.
Why The Need To Strike Out Alone?
Each generation seeks to improve upon the legacy left by the preceding one. Millennials have grown up watching their parents work (mostly) 9-5 desk jobs with fixed routines and only the weekend off, often having to grovel for an extended leave of a week during the summer.
This has spurned them to take their professional lives into their own hands, and earn a fat paycheck on their own terms. Start-ups, blogs, and Instagram celebrities have become the order of the day, with funding coming largely from product endorsements on their pages and racking up the maximum number of views.
To compare is human, and when the grass begins to seem greener on the other side, with people seeing their counterparts in less traditional jobs flying high with better pay, more free time, and a comparatively flexible routine at a younger age, dissatisfaction with traditional jobs is bound to creep in.
Therefore, it can be quite safely concluded that the rise of new age jobs have played a role in making people with traditional jobs feel less satisfied with their source of employment.
Image Credits: Google Images
Sources: Forbes, HR in Asia, DNA India, Times of India