Search This Blog

Monday, September 20, 2010

How non-traditional are you?

At the fall Working for the Fox Valley job fair the Today Show filmed some of the job seekers for a piece that they were working on for Monday, September 20, 2010 http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/26184891/vp/39267648#39267648  while none of the footage appeared in the segment, we did notice there were several men being filmed and interviewed for the piece. This clip noted that there are more women in the workforce today than men.


The Today Show discussion was based on an article in Newsweek this week on the new masculinity. http://www.newsweek.com/2010/09/20/why-we-need-to-reimagine-masculinity.html  But let's discuss what non-traditional means. Jobs throughout history have been segmented toward a particular gender. During World War II, for example, while the men were overseas fighting the war, there was a large push for women to fill the jobs previously held by the soldiers. Hence the name, Rosie the Riveter. When the men returned, most of the women went back to their stay at home lives. By today's definition, non-traditional occupations would be:

Men - nursing, home health care, teachers, customer service reps and stay-at-home dads.
Women - construction, truck driver, airline pilot, CEO, CFO, and many, many more.

Have you ever heard the term blue job or pink job? It was explained to me as blue jobs are those jobs around the home that would traditionally be performed by the male in the household - lawn work, home repairs, garbage to the curb, and a pink job would be those performed by the female - laundry, childcare, cooking, cleaning, errands, shopping, etc. What happens in a non-traditional experience is that the household duties are shared, as should the work world duties.

While the world is still a long way from having employment areas not be defined by "non-traditional", a quote from the Newsweek article states: In fact, men dominate only two of the 12 job titles expected to grow the most between 2008 and 2018: construction worker and accountant. The rest, including teachers (501,000 new positions), registered nurses (582,000), home health aides (461,000), and customer-service reps (400,000), remain heavily female. All told, the social sector of the economy will gain 6.9 million jobs by 2018.


There are emerging jobs in the market place.  One of our partners explains them well - http://www.illinoisworknet.com/VOS_PORTAL/industry/en/home/EmergingJobs. If you are currently unemployed and determining whether you need to update your existing skills or find a new career path, you may wish to research the Key Sectors of employment defined in Illinois as Agriculture, Healthcare, Information Technologies, Manufacturing and Transportation, Distribution and Logistics.  Perhaps you might find an area that would interest you.

If you are interested in more non-traditional careers, an entire list can be found on this website: http://www.quintcareers.com/non-traditional_careers.html

Employed or not, perhaps you will investigate moving into one of those more non-traditional areas of employment.