Careers then . . .

During my elementary school days, I could recall my Mom talking about others who are in the banking or teaching industry. Maybe those were the high paying or respectable careers in the early to mid 1960s. She was so awed by children of other families in that job. Probably that was her way of telling us what course to take in college. One of my older brothers, our eldest, was into sales in the pharmaceutical industry. There was nothing really said about people in sales during those years. It could be that the term "salesman or saleslady" was a few grades, or levels, lower then when it comes to career. Another career that was said to give a good future was engineering. Quite odd, but during those days we thought, or we were oriented, that engineers were those who operated trains! That was why I never said in school that my Pop was an engineer (LOL), though he was both a Civil and Mining Engineer, and a good one at that!
Somewhere in the 1970s, the career as a salesman started to edge other careers. There were sales engineers and other sales people from other professions. As for myself, I was in the banking industry as a working student in 1974, then got into automotive sales in the last quarter of 1976. Why? My brother I was next to, was in that industry and I saw him making good! Commissions alone on one car sale is twice that of my regular one month salary with the bank! True enough I made it good and in less than 4 months, I was promoted as a Branch Sales Manager. The car sales industry was good in our country until early 1979, then it suddenly went slow in the second quarter. I was only 25 years old then and decided to find employment in the pharmaceutical sales industry. It was not difficult to find a job in those years as long as one had a college degree. When I got into that industry, I never thought that it was better, career-wise and the pay. As a medical representative, it was almost glamorous as you worked on your own time and disposal! Visits from higher-ups came only once a month or as rare as once in three months! There were so many perks in that industry then. Being in that industry started to look so good in the mid 1980s. It was a blessing in disguise for me to have left that industry in late 1982 when we started to go on our own business.

Now and the recent past, time has changed career opportunities. Sales and engineering careers are no longer that lucrative, except for Electronics engineering. In a third world country, there was nothing foreseen on this until the mid 1990s. Our country was entertaining "new" gadgets that were actually discards of first world countries. Anyone who specialized on them were simply misled. A good example was the Beta format video as against the VHS format. Same is true with cellular telephones. The career opportunities in our country, as of this writing, is the Nursing course and the Information Technology (I.T.). It hasn't changed for quite some time now.