Have you ever picked a job based on the fact that you were good at it, but later found it made you feel very uncomfortable over time? If you don’t know about your personality, it will hurt you in the long term regardless of your skills or the job’s pay. There are several areas of your personality that you need to consider to help you find a good job. 【小题1】

Do you prefer working alone or with other people?

There are isolating jobs that will drive an outgoing person crazy. 【小题2】 Most people are not extremes in either direction. But they do have a tendency that they prefer. There are also positions that are sometimes a combination of the two. This may be the best for someone in the middle who adapts easily to either situation.

How do you handle changes?

Most jobs these days have some elements of changes to them, but some are more than others. If you need stability(稳定) in your life, you may need a job where the changes don’t happen so often. 【小题3】

What type of work environment do you enjoy？

This can range from being in a large building with a lot of people you won’t know immediately to a smaller setting where you’ll get to know almost all the people there fairly quickly.

【小题4】

Some people are motivated(激励) by the pay they get, while others feel too stressed to be like that. The variety of payment designs in the sales industry is a typical example for this.

【小题5】 I’ve seen it over and over again with people that they make more money over time when they do something they love. Finding out about your personality may take you a little longer, but making a move to do what you have a passion for can change the course of your life for the better.

Unretirement: older people return to paid employment

The disappearance of 565,000 mostly older people from the UK’s labour force was one of the problematic effects of Covid. In other countries, employment levels recovered more quickly to pre-2020 levels, making the UK exceptional. But while evidence in the past few months points to a change of this trend — the rise of “unretirement” — there is no room for relief.

Government initiatives to address the issue have achieved little. The Treasury came up with the idea of “returnerships”, a variant of the skills training aimed at persuading mature people back to workplaces. But in reality this is not much more than a new label for existing training. Meanwhile, fewer than one in 20 of participants in the government’s “skills training camps” — courses intended to equip jobseekers for the opportunities in their area — are aged over 55.

Mel Stride, the work and pensions secretary, championed the idea of over-50s delivering takeaways, and doing other jobs more readily associated with younger workers.Age should not be a barrier to anyone willing and able to do this kind of work. But more importantly, government ministers should extend employment beyond low-wage private sector vacancies(空缺) to labour shortages in health, education and social care — where umemployment problem is serious.

Revealed in one survey, descriptions of returning to employment are highly variable.Some did so because they were struggling with the rising cost of living. Others found that they missed the company of co-workers, wanted to make a contribution to family finances or needed“a purpose in life”.

The 26.5% of adults aged 50 to 64 who are economically inactive — neither working nor seeking work — is still too high. The coexistence of high levels of economic inactivity with key worker shortages in vital areas such as teaching remains hugely problematic. But rising employment levels can be seen as part of a delayed return to normality. And Ministers still need to better target policies to encourage economically inactive 50–to 64-year-olds back to work.

A walk around the workplace is also a trip back in time. The office is where colleagues meet, work and bond. But it is also a time capsule, where the traces of historic patterns of working ere visible everywhere. The pandemic has enhanced this sense of office as a dig site for corporate archaeologists(考古学家).

The most obvious object is the landline phone, a reminder of the days when mobility meant being able to stand up and keep talking. Long after people have junked them in their personal lives—less than 15% of Americans aged between 25 and 34 had one at home in the second half of 2021—landline phones survive in offices.

There might be good reasons for its persistence: they offer a more secure and stable connection than mobile phones, and no one worries that they are about to run out of battery. In practice, the habit of using them was definitely lost during the pandemic. Now they sit on desk after desk, rows of buttons unpressed, ring tones unheard.

Landline phones were already well on their way out before covid-19 struck. Whiteboard charts have suffered a swifter desertion. These objects signal a particular type of pain—people physically crowded together into a room while a manager sketches a graph with a marker pen and points meaningfully to the top-right-hand corner, giving requirements never to be satisfied. This manager is still making graphs but is now much more likely to use a PowerPoint. The crowd is still being tortured but is now much more likely to be watching on the screen. The office still has whiteboards, but they are left in corners and the charts on them are slowly yellowing.

Real archaeologists need tools and time to do their painstaking work: brushes, shovels and picks. Corporate archaeology is easier: you just need eyes and a memory of how things used to be. But you also need to be quick as more and more work places are rearranged for the post-pandemic era. Now its time to take a careful look around the office: you may see something that will soon seem outdated.