If Jobs were like School

If you’ve watched television in the past week, there is a good chance that you have run across Education Nation, which is a very important summit and debate about our educational system in the US. Education policy of course touches upon every aspect of life: from parental involvement, economic policy, and proper nutrition to teacher wages, testing, and standards.

Working on Recruiter.com, I am pretty far removed from anything having to do with education. Professionally, I tend to think a lot more about employment, recruiting, and job search issues. I was watching some of the coverage about Educational policy and feeling glad that I’m not in school anymore. Why?

Because if jobs were like school:

1. We would have to ask our boss if we could use the bathroom.
2. We would have to ask our boss if we could have a drink of water.
3. We would get evaluated on our job performance not every year or every quarter, but multiple times every day.
4. We would never get a raise.
5. We would have to eat lunch with our co-workers every day. Lunch would be made by our company.
6. Our bosses would rig up two way communication devices in our offices and make disembodied announcements throughout the day. Once in a while, they would use it to listen in on us as well.
7. There would be bells every hour.
8. If we left work, we would face legal action.
9. We would have departments based on performance, not function. Forget Human Resources or Finance: we would have “Top Employees”, “Middle Employees”, and “Bottom Employees.”
10. We wouldn’t be able to talk to the person sitting at a nearby desk.
11. We would have to fold our hands, cross our legs, and make various other physical poses as required by our boss.

Are you feeling pretty good about your job yet? Man, it feels good to be an adult.