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What is your Occupation?

Sometimes last week, I needed to sign a document which required me to state my occupation, that reminded me of King Leonidas and the 300 Spartans. I guess you remember “Spartans, what is your Occupation!!!??”.

At first I was confused, I did not know what to write in the occupation space ( I will explain that in a bit). Back in the days, my Dad was a Teacher hence it was easy to fill forms requesting for Parent’s occupation. All I needed to do was write Teacher  (or Teaching) as Parent’s occupation. However, today, I am pursuing a career in a relatively “adolescent” and disruptive industry hence when asked my occupation, I did not know whether to write Software Engineer or Programmer or Web Developer or Blogger or Social Media Activist or “Laptop Repairer”   as most people see folks like me. I eventually settled in for “IT Professional”, a term that encapsulates so many disciplines. (Kinda too wide)

I decided to do some digging deep (shalla to the RCCG members) into the term “Occupation” so that I am not caught un-awares in future, as expected, a quick Googling of the term returned About 282,000,000 results; results enough to last me a lifetime of data-mining.

Eventually, I narrowed down on this one; “An Occupation is a person’s usual or principal work or business, especially as a means ofearning a living;”

Long story short, where is this Uber driving us?

What I have come to discover is that our fancy job titles often times do not define our occupations. your occupation is your PRINCIPAL WORK.

What do you do?

Why are you on the payroll?

Why have they not dropped you from the team?

Why has the downsizing and the rightsizing happening in the industry not affected you yet? (Sey you know we are in a recession?)

The answer to those questions define your OCCUPATION.

So let me ask again in Leonidas’ voice, “What is your occupation!!!!????”

I think I know mine now!

#Peace

 

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