If you're a doctor or a cop, you probably enjoy it when people ask you what you do for a living. You can explain your job in one word and people will respect you for it. You could be the worst doctor in the world - like say you're a surgeon who turns people in Siamese twins twice a week - and you would still be respected. Or you could be a cop who shoots eye witnesses to save on paper work. It wouldn't matter. You have a one word job description and people will love you for it.
Now, I've held a fair numbers of positions in my time and I've been called many things and what i notive is that rarely do people do what their titles say they do or at least allude to what they do. Sometimes, their job titles are downright misleading. A personal example was when i was a student i took a job with Shell and my official title was Senior Sanitation Engineer. Sounds impressive right? Makes you think that my job involved heavy machinery or something, right? Well, the only heavy machinery i operated was a vacuum cleaner as in real world terms, I was a cleaner. Companies sometimes also are guilty of giving position titles that are so idiosyncratic to that company no one outside tha company would have the slightest inkling of what that job actualy does.
Now, I've held a fair numbers of positions in my time and I've been called many things and what i notive is that rarely do people do what their titles say they do or at least allude to what they do. Sometimes, their job titles are downright misleading. A personal example was when i was a student i took a job with Shell and my official title was Senior Sanitation Engineer. Sounds impressive right? Makes you think that my job involved heavy machinery or something, right? Well, the only heavy machinery i operated was a vacuum cleaner as in real world terms, I was a cleaner. Companies sometimes also are guilty of giving position titles that are so idiosyncratic to that company no one outside tha company would have the slightest inkling of what that job actualy does.
In one company i worked for which by the way was a Direct Marketing Company, there was a chap who's job title was Assistant Quality Administrator for Excellence. To this day i have no idea what he did and i worked there! I'm sure many of you have strange or jargonic sounding position titles and feel free put a comment on my blog. Anyway, i suppose he bottom line is you shouldn't always take what people say they do at face value, and a basic rule of thumb i suppose, is that the more sylables the title has, the lower down the food chain that position most likely is.
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