What Do I Do? Depends on What Week It Is

Sean Aiken has an interesting take on his quest to find new work. After getting a business degree, he still didn’t know what he wanted to do, so he took a typical GenY approach, and made a media event of his career search.

What Do I Do? Depends on What Week It Is

When Sean Aiken was a boy, he thought he might like to be a professional basketball player once he grew up. Now he is 25, and he is decidedly less certain.

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In that way he is like so many of his millennial generation — new workers wavering on the threshold of real life, determined to get it right, they say, and fearful that they might get it wrong.

“My father looked at me,” Mr. Aiken recalled, “and said, ‘I’ve been around 60 years and I’ve yet to find something I’m passionate about except your mother.’” Sobered by that thought, Mr. Aiken hatched his plan to work at 52 jobs in a year and to chronicle the search on a Web site, oneweekjob.com. He would take no salary for the work, but would encourage his “employers” to make a donation to charity. He spread the word through a mass e-mail message to friends and family and eventually through word of Web.

This is an interesting take, but not one that all of us could try. (For one – how many of us could afford to take a whole year off to find ourselves or our future?) I also wonder what this says about the status of the career center at Mr. Aiken’s alma mater. Still, Aiken is finding out some things about work in the real world.

Someone should give him a shot at being a recruiter for a week.