CAMB. IELTS BOOK ONE TEST 4 TASK 2 The idea of having a single career is becoming an old fashioned one.

The new fashion will be to have several careers or ways of earning money and further education will be something that continues throughout life.
Once upon a time a job was often a job for life, and the training we received in our late teens and early twenties was our preparation for that job. Our career was our progress within that job, as we moved up the ladder of promotion and pay scale. Sometimes we changed companies in order to jump up another rung on that ladder, but we were what we were a teacher, for example, or an accountant, a lawyer, an electrician, or an architect. In the 1960s some people began to rebel against that idea, feeling that it was too confining, and there have always been people who have found themselves in jobs and careers which did not satisfy them, and who have broken out to head off in a different direction. Then in the 1970s and 1980s economic recessions showed workers that employers had no sense of loyalty towards them. If a company needs to make redundancies they have no room for sentiment. There is really no such thing as a job for life. Many people, especially in traditional industries such as mining, car making or the steel industry, found themselves forced to contemplate retraining. The alternative was to be left behind and to become unemployable. As computers became ubiquitous, whole new industries appeared, and more and more people have realised that we are now living in a state of permanent technological revolution. As the service industries replace the secondary sector and life style fashions evolve ever more quickly, there are many new opportunities. Who would have thought, thirty years ago, that so many people would retrain in so many areas? The other side of this, of course, is that it is great fun. Many people enjoy learning new skills. There is no need to feel regret that you somehow made the wrong choice, there will be another opportunity in the future. It is also possible to run two different careers alongside each other, and then later focus on the one which is proving to be more successful. At the same time, we are living longer, and, despite, the promises that we would all have more leisure time in the future, it seems that since the birth rate in most developed countries is falling, we will have to work longer in order to finance our retirement. It would seem logical that if we are going to have to work for more than forty years, in an atmosphere of continued technological change, we should embrace that change by using our intelligence and skills in different ways at different stages of our working life. To summarise, it seems to me that lifelong learning will be the norm for the future, and that opportunities for continued learning throughout life will both support and encourage the fashion of career change. The task for governments is to provide that education, and to prepare young people to be able to take advantage of it.

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