One meaning of vocation is an urge to a particular calling
or career.
Another meaning of vocation is a specified profession or
trade.
It’s rather unscientific, but lately I have been keeping a
rough count some days of how many times tweets and blogs cover issues, terms
and concepts such as employee engagement,
talent, succession, potential, wellbeing, motivation, morale etc. oh and
err, vocation.
They have appeared on my Twitter feed in something like the
order presented above, with the tally for employee
engagement towering above them all. This is despite following a lot of
public service professionals and organisations in addition to the HR, OD and
L&D community and media.
I have worked with public service professionals for my whole
career. I have lost count of how many times I have been blown away by their
dedication – a direct product of their strong sense of vocation. So often this
has sustained them through very challenging times and major change. After all
they, no we (as I count myself in here) are there to provide the services their
professional training has equipped and prepared them for. And the sense of
professional and job satisfaction gained is incalculable.
Remember books like this?
Remember ‘careers’ at school, at
college? Remember feeling passionate about your chosen career? Remember standard
questions from aunts or uncles or other infrequently seen family grown up
friends such as ‘What subjects do you
like school’? Or ‘What do you want to
be when you grow up?’
Did any of us say:
‘I want to be
responsible for a highly specified component part of the process involved in
educating young people?’
Or:
‘I want to write reports recommending
specified interventions and courses of action but I have no interest in carrying
them out or seeing if they work?’
‘Oh and by the way, I
want to do this for a generic employer who currently has the contract for that
service and is using a sophisticated employee engagement strategy to motivate
its staff.’
(Just thinking about and writing the paragraph above demoralises
me and I can’t imagine any of these being related to the word ‘urge’.)
When did things start to get more generic? How much has
standardisation and extreme process mapping reduced vocational roles down into
components?
At the same time, there is a massive support for the
benefits of employee engagement and the impact on the bottom line is
increasingly evidenced. I have found it interesting and useful to read about
and ponder on the locus of engagement. For example, is the sense of engagement
felt about the company, the team, the job content, the role or the profession?
I think that for the last two (and in Utopia all of these) having a vocation in
line with an urge to a calling or career is essential. Yet I fear that the
meaning usually attached to vocation these days is simply a specified
profession or trade. We still at least routinely use the term to describe
national work based qualifications (NVQs or VQs) yet I think this is based on
the second meaning.
