My parents both started their careers as language teachers. My mom taught high school English and my dad taught high school Spanish. He eventually became a district administrator and she got her MLS and became a school librarian.
I majored in English (emphasis in medieval and Renaissance lit) and now am a technical writer. So kinda-sorta related if you squint, but different! Sometimes when I’m over dealing with software engineers, I daydream about getting my MLS. Or a paralegal certification. Or anything but dealing with software engineers. (I kid, I kid) (Mostly)
My mom has always worked in retail, hotels and food service. I did my share of that (food service, at least) in high school.
My dad is a telephone technician for AT&T. I became a missile systems electronics technician in the Army and eventually used the GI Bill to become an electrical engineer. I work on the power grid now, though it’s mostly getting different devices to communicate to each other properly. So in a way, I followed my dad’s path, getting electronics training in the military (He was Air Force in the 80s) and working on communications systems afterwards.
But I had a detour in college and now I make more money than my dad. Also my dad doesn’t work at a desk nearly as much as I do. He digs underground and climbs telephone poles. I program things in an office and then go to refineries, substations and power plants to install and test them.
My dad’s an engineer, wanted me to be an engineer, I became an engineer. He’s mechanical and I’m electrical, so not identical. I’ve since moved on to a more non-engineering career, but still pretty tech heavy.
My mom’s in the healthcare field, which was something that never appealed to me.
And don’t misunderstand, I didn’t get into engineering just because my dad wanted me to. I was not forced into it. Could have done accounting, teaching, any number of things but engineering was most interesting to me. (After I abandoned hope of a pro baseball career)
My father was an automotive mechanic, by 14 years old I could rebuild most any component on the car. I took a job as an auto mechanic for a private fleet and switched over to trucks within the first year. I spent the next 44 years working on trucks or running truck shops.
Dad was a university chemistry professor and mom was a social worker and adjunct professor. I admired and appreciated their acoomplishments, but I was a doer rather than a teacher. I started my working life as a quality inspector in a lab, so I have dad to thank for knowing my way around a lab and how to conduct scientific tests. Eventually I made my way into human resources and found my calling. I’ve certainly used elements of my mother’s sociological knowledge in my profession, so I like to think I’ve carried a little of both of them with me.
My father worked in electronics both in the private sector in the 70’s and then for Dept of Defense from the early 80’s on. My mother was a day care provider, then went into nursing. I doubt the either one of them ever considered either a career in radio or the brokerage industry (my two careers). I never considered doing what they did. It just didn’t interest me.
My mother was a HS dropout who stayed at home until my kid sister was about 12. Then she worked mostly office work, although she did work for a while in sales. My father went broke operating a gas and service station in the 30s and spent the rest of his life in a factory. My mother claimed he finished HS.
It was always understood at home that I would go to college. But my falling in love with math was a total shock to people who thought that meant adding long columns of numbers or something. But they understood well enough when I got good paying jobs as a professor.
My younger brother was a high powered systems analyst who spent most of his career doing it free-lance because it paid better. My kid sister sold jewelry in a large chain and we regularly the hottest (in both the sexual and business senses) salesman in the entire chain, making well over $100,000 in commissions every year. To a great extent this continued even after her looks faded. So really no connection between what our parents did and what we did.
My dad was an engineer/project manager, my mom a cost accountant/database type person. I’m a high school teacher, which is pretty different. However, they influenced my attitude about work in tremendous ways.
One, I always wanted a clearly defined job, which I think was based on their model. I wanted to graduate college knowing exactly what I would go do, not finish with something vague like a degree in business.
Two, work mattered to both my parents. They took a lot of pride in being good workers. I always felt like having a job and working hard were crucial components in being a respectable human being. Now my mom, retired, chides me for working too hard, and I just look at her like she’s crazy–I totally learned it from her.
My dad was part owner of a business. He worked all the time, he traveled a lot, and he did it all for us but I’d rather have had less money and more dad. I got as far away from it as I could.
Now I wonder if that was the right decision to make - I could have owned the company by now. Don’t know if it would have been worth it. But I’ve consistently made decisions that would keep me from ever doing that 80 hour work week gone for weeks at a time sort of thing. I’ve never even worked a job where you really had to take it home with you, and I’m sure that’s why.
Dad had a degree in Geology, but sold candy, and then became a successful fund-raiser for United Way and did that for years. Mom was a teacher, then SAHM, then teacher, then office worker. The main thing I got from dad was not doing something in my field of study, and from my mom being an office drone.
I know I would have liked to have had someone to learn a business or trade from, to become expert in that. But it wasn’t to be that way. I voted I am doing something they would not have imagined.
My mom joined the Army at 17, was trained at Boeing as a mechanic and worked in military aviation till I was born. She then did a stint as a teacher’s aid while I was in early elementary.
My dad joined the Army, retired, worked for a pawn shop and then moved on to a finance company. Now he is an internal auditor for them.
So far I’ve been a bagger at a grocery store, an EMT and now am going to school to be a Mortuary Tech. So a BIIIG difference between what they did and what I’m doing.
My mom was an elementary school teacher. I was not drawn to that because there’s so little freedom and so much bureaucratic overhead.
I knew my dad was a physicist but until high school I could not have told you what physics was. And I was well into adulthood before I had more than a vague glimmering of what it was that he was actually immersed in. So I didn’t aspire to that because it was an incomprehensible black-box unknown thing.
My field of work would have never occurred to my parents. Hell, it never even occurred to me.
Dad started as a surveyor who went on to manage a few local branches of a road construction company. He and mom wanted the kids to go to college and we’d all dreamed of me becoming a wildlife biologist.
After graduating, I needed a full time job and took a position in the analytical laboratory of an air emissions testing firm. I’ve been in the air emissions biz ever since and couldn’t be happier. I’m not sure my parents fully understand what I do, even today.
No influence at all. Seriously, the only career advice my dad offered me was that I should learn to play a musical instrument so during periods of unemployment I could stand out and play on the street and collect money in a hat.
I voted for the “No way…!” option. My father was a mechanical engineer; my mother basically didn’t work after she married. Dad died when I was ten; but it was already then clear to me, that I could never do for a living, what he did – I am by nature clueless in the extreme about anything mechanical or indeed practical. As things worked out, I mucked up my higher education and most of my potential opportunities, and spent most of my working life in lower-echelon office jobs.
I have two brothers, both younger. The “middle” one of us would seem to be the one who basically inherited Dad’s talent: he’s spent his working life as an engineering draughtsman. The youngest is like me, on the impractical side (though not to such a past-praying-for extent, as me). The majority of his working life to date, has been as a teacher.
But after deciding that it was no longer amusing to work terrible hours for rotten pay among lunatics, I went back to school and wound up in a profession related to but different from theirs.
Still have rotten hours and work with loonies, but the pay is better.