Continuing yesterday’s theme of identity, describing what you do for a living can be tricky if you don’t work in a well-known profession. If someone tells you they’re a doctor, teacher, lawyer or police officer, you have a pretty good idea what their job entails. However, if you work in such professions as web development, computer programming, management consultancy, etc, many people don’t really understand what you do.<\/p>\n
Many of us define ourselves by our jobs. We say “I am an X” or “I work as a Y”. We also define ourselves in other ways, including by sex, race, age, nationality, language(s) spoken, interests, and\/or in terms of our families and our position\/roles therein.<\/p>\n
In my case, my current job title is “Web Developer”, but few people understand what that entails. There are in fact many different specialisms under the umbrella of web development – my particular specialism is building multilingual websites. So I usually just tell people that I build and translate websites. This often prompts questions like “Do you design the sites as well?”, and “Are you a translator then?” – in answer to which I explain that someone else usually does the design and translation. My role is to turn the designs into websites, and to add the translations to them, which involves a lot of copying and pasting. I think my parents just tell people that I work with computers and\/or do something with websites.<\/p>\n