Would you encourage your DC to follow your career path?

[TravellingSpoon]

Inspired by a conversation I had with my colleague. I work in a social care role and there seems to be loads of mums/daughter, sisters etc who work in similar roles together. I would not discourage my DD from the work I do, but I would tell her to choose her employer wisely as there are so many bad ones out there.

Accountant in practice. No way. It's become a race to the bottom as it's unregulated so every man and his dog setting up as self employed accountants doing small business accounts and tax returns, with no qualifications and some with no experience. It's like the Wild West out there with the unscrupulous feasting on people who assume it's a regulated profession like law, architecture, financial advice, etc.

I'm not sure. A few years ago I would have said definitely not as the pay is not great and it's not glamorous or exciting. But now I'm older and have a family I appreciate the really boring stuff like the pension, mat leave and work/life balance.

If my 20 year old self could read that she would be so disappointed in me

Depends. I work in investment banking and my job can be quite interesting depending of the exact role.

But, you need to lov this kind of work and so far DD would be miserable at it. So unless she has a change of personality in the next couple of years I very much think she will do something very different.

Same with DH, he works in IT and she hates programming, coding, IT development with a passion.

Mine showed absolutely no interest in going into the same profession as me. They’vedone very different things from each other and very different from me. One of them married someone with the same job as me though.

I wouldn't like him to follow me, I worked in finance, it paid well but it is definitely all consuming with certain corporations, i would like him to be in a lighter hearted role, not dreaming of work (or maybe that's just my personality ).

My DH works as part of the SLT of a internet/phone company and again, is all consuming, so no thank you.

I want him to have a good work life balance and just be happy.

Both DH and I would be happy if DC followed our careers. I would also encourage DC to retrain if they were unhappy in their jobs.

Never, hcp, thankfully so far neither of them has shown any interest, probably too.many years of hearing me whinge

Yes, I'm an academic and I do think it's a much better career than a lot of other things if that's what you're into (I work for a very good Russell Group uni which is very supportive and where I'm well paid for where I am in my career - it's obviously not this easy everywhere though). When I was growing up, my mum worked in finance in a big corporate job. She told me my whole life never to go into a career like that as she hated it so much, but it paid well and she had no choice to keep us afloat. It was wise advice and I think was a major influence on the path I chose.

If they wanted to, no problem. It's not exciting but I have good days most of the time. I feel compared to a lot of people I'm happy in my work and I would be glad if my kids were too.