Looking Back to the Industrial Revolution for Career Inspiration

If you’re at the stage in your life which has you contemplating a career to get into or even if you’re thinking of a career change, then it’s perhaps not applicable to ask you if you remember the days when people who had certain crafts were referred to as smiths? You’d have an ironsmith or just a smith in reference to someone who works with metals, amongst other “smiths” (something-smith). These are some of the positives which came out of the Industrial Revolution. People had a fighting chance at establishing solid careers for themselves by merely learning a trade.

These days it’s a little more difficult and we often adopt a wait-and-see tactic following our formal schooling and subsequent qualification, whether through learning an artisan-type skill or if we’ve gone through college for further education and training via an academic course. You often find yourself in an industry which seemingly has absolutely nothing to do with what you studied for, but that mere fact suggests that actually all fields and careers are in some way linked to each other.

If you’re a chemist for example, or chemistry formed part of your field of study, these days that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll be working in some lab somewhere. Yes, analyzing the chemical composition of some substances is a part of the chemical industry for which you might require access to the BaTiO3, SrTiO3, and similar chemicals. You can find BaTiO3 in the UK (or elsewhere) from a chemical factory, shop, or buy online as per your convenience.

But, that is not what chemical professionals do. There are other jobs as well that may require proficiency in the chemical industry. For instance, you might perhaps find yourself working in the metal industry, perhaps helping to develop the best low melting point alloy to go into a range of end-user products or something along those lines.

You might work as a chemical lab assistant or as a researcher. Job tasks vary according to the job profile. A researcher, for example, must conduct multiple experiments, make reports on the results, and then publish papers on their findings. However, if you are a lab assistant, you may have been assigned to help the scientists conduct studies, which may entail keeping everything ready and cleaning lab equipment using a water distiller for sale, among other things.

Looking back to the Industrial Revolution in this way can make for a great way through which to draw some inspiration for a career to pursue, revealing the very important property of the fact that careers and fields are all linked in some or other way. This means that you don’t necessarily have to pursue a field of study with a direct and obvious link to the industry you’d like to make a career in.

To expand on what is turning out to be a great example in the metal industry, or indeed even just a specific portion of the metal industry (alloys), you have all sorts of professionals and skilled workers working in the industry. It isn’t necessarily just the likes of mechanical engineers, chemists, geologists, etc who are working in the industry.

A products concept designer for example might be working at Babbitt Alloys, completing a job in which no two days are the same. This qualified and skilled professional who would likely be very talented too would probably enjoy every single second of their job since there are some exciting designs to be conceptualised as far as alloy metals go to into an endless range of components and even complete products.

Just off the top of my head, I’d probably go to this particular company if I wanted a custom alloy metal nozzle to fit onto a 3-D printing machine with which I’d be printing plastic objects.