Meaning & use
career path
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Meaning
nouncountable
The series of jobs and steps a person takes over time in a line of work, or the route planned to advance in it.
Grammar: Countable: one career path, several career paths.
Patterns
- follow a career path
- a career path in something
- change your career path
She chose a career path in nursing after volunteering at a hospital.
The company explains the career path for new engineers on its website.
He had never planned his career path; it simply developed one job at a time.
Word forms
| plural | career paths |
|---|
Common combinations
- choose a career path
- Many students are unsure how to choose a career path.
- follow a career path
- He followed a career path from teacher to school principal.
- clear career path
- Employees stay longer when there is a clear career path.
- change career path
- At forty, she decided to change career path and become a chef.
- traditional career path
- Law offers a traditional career path with well-known stages.
Synonyms and how they differ
- career
- Career can mean the whole working life, while career path emphasizes the route and stages along it.
- profession
- A profession is a type of skilled occupation, not the journey through jobs.
- trajectory
- Trajectory is more formal and stresses direction of progress, not the specific jobs.
- vocation
- Vocation suggests a calling or strong sense of purpose rather than a planned sequence of roles.
Word family
Commonly confused: career path or carrier?
career path vs carrier
A carrier transports or passes something on; career refers to a person's working life.
Practice
The school counselor helped Ravi explore a ______ in engineering that would suit his interests.
Choose one answer.
Career path is the fixed phrase for a planned route through work. Carrier path is a confusable-sounding word pair with a different meaning.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “career path”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.