Last week at the conference I was participating in, I sat in on a talk about communities. In the presentation, there was a statistic thrown out saying that nowadays people will have 10-14 different jobs by the time they’re 38. I looked at that and thought it was incredulous, I’m halfway to 38 and this is my first job! But then I thought about it more wrt myself:

1. Group piano teacher
2. Internet tech support
3. Private tutor
4. Coop term 1 – Applications Developer
5. Coop term 2 – General tech support
6. Coop term 3 – Web developer
7. Coop term 4 – Software developer
8. Coop term 5 – Software developer (different place)
9. Whatever you call my role in DQ
10. Coop term 6 – SDET
11. Coop term 7 – PM
12. Being a grad student – yes this is a job, because you have to manage your academic career
13. IBM

That’s 13 jobs in different environments. Sure some of the jobs were similar and use transferable skills, but I think they were all situationally different. Even when I was at the same company, such as in coop terms 3 and 4, and 6 and 7; I changed department and job.

Maybe I’m a bit different, having gone to Waterloo, but it’s not hard to rack up a couple of different experiences before you start your full time job. If you don’t have coop terms, you have summers. Although I wish that I had a wider breadth of experiences. Maybe I should have applied for those Coop jobs working in a zoo.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: growingup, uwaterloo.ca, working