The reason you were asked to reflect on the word 'career' is that we need to be clear what we mean by it before we start the work of this programme.

Everyone agrees that career is something that happens over time - a series of events rather than a single event.

There is less agreement about whether promotion, advancement and structure are necessary for a series of roles to be called a career. Some people who include these things in their definition feel that the fortunate amongst us have careers, the rest have jobs.

For the purposes of the tasks we will be doing, it's unhelpful to think of career in this way and we would ask you to leave aside this type of definition for now. Very few people's working lives correspond to a pattern of continuous ordered progression but that does not mean they do not have a career.

There's a further problem to the idea that 'career' must involve advancement and promotion: some people choose to stay at the same level because they simply don't want the change in role that promotion would imply. They may decide to concentrate on doing their job better rather than moving up to another. Others make a deliberate move to a position of lesser responsibility and reward, often for work-life balance.

Here's our definition that we will use for this programme: 'career' simply means the series of employment-related activities an individual carries out through their lifetime. These activities do not have to be confined within a particular occupation, nor do they have to involve promotion or advancement. They may include periods out of the paid labour market - to bring up children, for example. By this definition everyone who spends time working - in whatever way - has a career.

So your career began with your first day's work - whatever that was - and has brought you to where you are now. Let's start to explore that journey.

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