Change, Resistance and Adult Age

Change and Adults
Technology is spreading irresistibly and bringing with it new pro­blems. For some persons, automation expands the world of career choice; for others, it closes opportunity. Change, along with accom­modation or resistance to it, is bringing about the retraining of the worker to give him new skills and is causing the manager to wonder how he can best use the computer in decision making. Unskilled jobs are becoming a smaller and smaller fraction of all jobs, making for some less than a bright future.
It may be well to remember that throughout a lifetime a person may have several careers. The man who is twenty years old may expect to make at least six job changes during his working life and to retire earlie.r than his father did. Choosing an occupatic1n ranks second in importance only to the selection of a mate in marriage. How and where a person will spend even his or her nonworking hours is influenced by such choice. Most important, occupational chokes must be made carefully because in many cases there is no going back. True, some people change their occupations, sometimes for the better. However, for most people in our culture, the general area of voca­tional choices lasts for a lifetime, although specific; jobs may be changed several times.
From many studies on the relationship between fathers' and sons' occupations come several conclusions. First, college students' stated choices tend to coincide with the occupations of their fathers more often than would be expected by statistical chance. Serond, the greater the father's income, the more likely the student is to gravitate toward a money-making career. The mo:e money currently earned by
the father, the more the student expects to be earning in the future. Third, sons tend to enter and remain in occupations similar to those of their fathers. Fourth, when occupations of fathers and sons are compared according to level (e.g., corporate vice-president or fore­man), sons whose fathers are at very high levels tend to enter lower occupations, and those whose fathers are at lower levels tend to enter higher' occupations. Mothers influence daughters in career planning, just as fathers influence their sons.