ABSTRACT
Careers and Jobs What is the difference between a job and a career? There is no more up-to-date riddle, but nobody yet seems to have thought of an answer. In the Panorama programme called Starting Work I thought I heard a figue of 70 per cent of adults in Britain in unsuitable jobs. It may well be quite accurate, but are we to suppose that if after proper guidance we were all shifted around, any reasonable majority of us would find ourselves in careers? This is only one of the unanswered questions that crowded in my mind as I watched this interesting programme. Moving away, as it now sometimes does, from superficial high politics, Panorama had arrived at a central social problem. The immediate cue was the difficulty of school-Ieavers finding any jobs at all in this year of high unemployment. The central focus was then on the kind of advice that is given between school and employment. Passing from cue to focus already involved a contradiction: between the fact of scarcity and the illusion of choice. But this faded behind the more massive contradiction: between the facts of most work and the illusion of universal careers.
