So, how does a career differ from a profession?

Business people at a seminar. A career, however, is generally post-academic. Photo/FILE 

In Summary

• The term curriculum vitae literally means “curriculum of life” or “history of life”
• A career is that part of one’s life spent in a particular occupation

Whenever you formally apply for a job, the first thing the potential employer is likely to demand from you is a “curriculum vitae” or “career details” or “professional notes”.

Do they all mean the same thing? More or less. For they refer to a written outline of one’s educational and employment history.

The term curriculum vitae literally means “curriculum of life” or “history of life”. The Latin noun vita (“life” as a biological phenomenon) yields the abstract noun vitality (“physical or mental liveliness” and energy) and the adjective vital (“essential”, “energetic” and “highly important”, especially in reference to life).

Though I have seen “curriculum vitaes”, there is no such thing in English. What the applicants send in are curricula vitae. Here, curriculum is what you pluralise because it is the substantive word.

Though vita is also a noun, the derivative vitae cannot be pluralised because it is functioning as an adjective. It means “of life”.

So how do curricula vitae differ from “career details” and “professional notes”? Generally speaking, nohow.

What the prospective employer is interested in, mostly, are details, in a tabular or notes form, of your academic achievements and work experience.

In this context, “career” is the same thing as “curriculum”.

In general, the term curriculum refers to all the courses, described in terms of time, that one follows at an academic institution.

"SERIES OF JOBS"

This is the sense of “curriculum” that the entire employment sector has borrowed and uses to describe one’s full theoretical upbringing and practical training, and the use to which one has put such training.

A career, however, is generally post-academic. Collins defines it as “the series of jobs in a profession or occupation that a person has through his or her life.”

A career is that part of one’s life spent in a particular occupation. In my journalistic career, I progressed from a cub reporter to a daily newspaper’s editor-in-chief.

The verb “to career” means to rush in an uncontrolled, undignified and frequently tragic fashion — much in the manner of Mr Toad behind the wheel of any new road contraption (in Kenneth Grahame’s satirical novel The Wind in the Willows). Certain Nairobi careerists called matatus have become professional bone-crushers.

 

But, no, it was not through careerism that I rose to the top of my profession. It took me all of 55 years of struggle and often excruciating pain.

A careerist is a person like the character in the book All The President’s Men who admits that he reached the top only “…by kissing a lot of arses…” in Richard Nixon’s White House.

How, however, does a career differ from a profession?

Again, I say: Nohow. Nohow, that is, except that a profession requires special training, as in law, medicine, architecture and journalism.

Yet, many Kenyans in my profession would never have passed muster in any rigorous system of preferment.

The astonishing thing about our MPs and other Kenyans who call themselves “professional politicians” is their absolute ignorance of political economy, civic needs and social engineering.

Email: philipotani@gmail.com