THE 7 JOB ITCH

There is the “7-year itch” in marriage and now there is talk that employees will have 7-different jobs over the course of their working careers.

It has given me pause to reflect on my jobs over the length of my working career.

Volunteerism has always been part of me from the onset. Anyone remember “candystripers”? Young high school students who would volunteer in the hospitals during summers, but I also continued it through my school year on weekends as well. Looking back, I can’t stress enough how volunteer work has helped me in my career securing paid employment. It was the beginning of building my skill-set.

In college, I worked for a copper refinery in the Engineering Dept and the President’s Office. It was an excellent training ground for employment in the office environment. I found it by working for a temp agency. As I proved myself, I was offered part-time work and I left the temp agency. The full-time ladies took me under their wings and mentored me throughout my college years, during summers and winter/spring breaks. Phelps Dodge Copper Refinery was my first paid job. I had mentors before mentoring became a term used by Human Resources.

Upon graduation and marriage, I left home and headed off to begin my nursing career. The possibilities were endless in nursing. There was cardiology, medical units, surgical units, and the burn unit. There was geriatric nursing care and my favorite of all, urgent care. It was in nursing that I honed my multi-tasking skills. It was a matter of survival. Not mine, my patients.

The early years of nursing prepared me for the next job to come along, motherhood. It taught me setting priorities and how to do more things than I had hands to do, all at the same time. Someone wrote a book, if a woman could “manage” motherhood, she could “manage” anything.  Agreed. There’s the budget (living within your means); employees (spouse/children); deadlines (bedtime) and project management (homework, science fair projects, after-school activities, etc).

There was the brief attempt at being a medical transcriptionist, as mentioned in a previous post but since I didn’t actually work in the field, I’ll just consider that experience new training.

Returning to volunteerism in the 90’s, teaching a class on food budgets and college counseling brings me to today. I work at a college and I’m also writing a blog on being frugal. Counting them up, that would be job #6 and job #7.

The focus of the blog is to give “sound” advice (or making noise) for saving money while raising a family. Thus, the section of each blog post called “Sound the Bugle”.

SOUND THE BUGLE! Today’s tip: Cook with 7-ingredients or less. The more ingredients you need, the costlier the meal. Your style of cooking will impact costs as well. Frying in oil is an added cost for the purchase of oil. Baking or broiling costs less and is healthier.