This course on Work and Employment offers you ideas and concepts with which you can reflect on your own work experience, analyse contemporary work societies and the organisations we work in. Thus, it is important to be able to connect the ideas we discuss to your own work experience.

In this first assignment we ask you, therefore, to write 600 words on any kind of work experience that you have had in your life so far. It is a first exercise with which we learn to reflect on work and employment and our own experiences are always a good and important starting point for Sociologists.

If you do not have any work experience yet, you can write about what kind of job you imagine in the future or what you would like to do for work after university.

The main point is that you REFLECT and do not just list jobs that you have done. What reflect means is you think about what you liked / disliked in particular work situation and why using - if possible - concepts from the course.

To give you an example I have written a "my Work Experience" report myself. Here it is:

Overall I have had 27 years of work experience. The very first paid job was a casual job as a gardener for a very small company. The task at hand was to fix and repaint a wooden fence. Because I had to organise the material for the job as well as manage my own time, I enjoyed the realisation of this little project enormously.

A few years after that I worked night shifts on an assembly-line. It was an exhausting job because I had no autonomy at all. The machine determined everything from eating breaks to going to the bathroom. I only lasted six weeks in this job before I quit. The best thing about that job was that it was paid very well and that I had a boss with whom I got along very well.

Next I worked in a hospital as a nurse's aid, a shift job again. Although I tremendously enjoyed working with people and being able to help people, it was emotionally very taxing. Pay does not compensate very well for coping with the emotional needs of a dying person or for seeing people in excruciating pain without being able to do anything. I decide to leave this job too in order to work as a construction worker.

Again, this was a very well paid job but after about 5 months I felt that it was physically too exhausting and lacked intellectual stimulus. That is when I decided to do an apprenticeship as a business administrator in an office furniture company. Apprenticeship meant that my job changed every two months in order to learn about every aspect of the business from HR to assembly to accounting. Three days of the week I was in the company and two days I was at school learning the theoretical basics about how to run a business.

While I learned the basics about how a business ticks, I also learned a lot about myself. After finishing the apprenticeship I worked my way up into management over 12 years. During that time I had already started studying philosophy, sociology and business administration. This enabled me to to a PhD and become a Senior Lecturer in Sociology, which is my current job.

I think it was the apprenticeship that enabled me to find out what I really wanted to do and what job satisfaction means for me. It was my favorite job before I became a Sociologist.

When I read through my little report on my work experience I can identify important topics like autonomy, physical, emotional and intellectual aspects of work. I can see that what is important to me about my jobs is linked to people, even the wider society. From all those jobs I learned that it is important to me to work with people, to have a job that is not just about earning money and that my job gives me a sense of being able to realise myself but also to shape society, the world we all live in.

The point of the Reflection Task is that you engage in depth with ONE of the weekly topics that has been covered before the due date (you cannot choose the same topic for your second reflection task). Your exercise should:

a) name and answer the weekly key question form the lecture by

b) defining and explaining in your own words the key concepts of the chosen week

c) refer to and reference the reading(s) of the chosen week to back up your key points (if possible do NOT just copy the quotes and references from the lectures and also do NOT use the lecture slides as reference)

Your reflection task is not allowed to exceed 800 words. The 10% rule does NOT apply! Do not reference the lecturer or the lecture slides! 

The point of the Reflection Task is that you engage in depth with ONE of the weekly topics that has been covered before the due date (you cannot choose the topic you have covered in your first reflection task). Your exercise should:

a) name and answer the weekly key question form the lecture by

b) defining and explaining in your own words the key concepts of the chosen week

c) refer to and reference the reading(s) of the chosen week to back up your key points (if possible do NOT just copy the quotes and references from the lectures and also do NOT use the lecture slides as reference)

Your reflection task is not allowed to exceed 800 words. The 10% rule does NOT apply! Do not reference the lecturer or the lecture slides!