Basics of Career Design

BASICS OF CAREER DESIGN is quite an uncanny career guide in that it does not so much focus on 'getting a job now' but in carefully explicating the factors that impact more or less indirectly on career chances, such as building a strong and stable identity, developing autonomy, or accepting one's difference. The author puts his focus, according to his twenty-seven years of research on sexual paraphilias, on the impact that uncommon desires may have on building a functional identity that is considered as 'acceptable' in the corporate world. Quoting a recent example from Thailand, where a new domestic airline hired transsexuals as stewardesses, the author explains that one's sexual difference is not per se an obstacle to finding one's niche in the job market. The author argues that we are all born different, and that total adaptation to the norms and rules of society is not the recipe for success, nor is the total rejection of those norms and rules, but a flexible adaptation that gives enough room for the blossoming of one's personal difference from the herd. The author compares career design with the voyage of the Fool in the Tarot that starts with becoming an individual, before one ever sets a step in the outside world. Other analyses he makes is why Adam & Eve had to leave paradise to develop identity, and the true meaning of the guru-disciple relationship.