Meaning & use
career
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Meanings
nouncountable
The long-term path of work a person follows in one field, including the jobs and promotions along the way.
Grammar: Often takes a possessive or adjective: her teaching career, a long career.
Patterns
- a career in something
- a career as something
She spent her whole career in public health.
He is planning a career as a pilot.
A knee injury ended his football career early.
nouncountable
The paid work or profession that someone chooses to build their working life around.
Grammar: Used before another noun too: a career choice, career advice.
Patterns
- choose a career
- change careers
Many students ask a counselor which career suits them.
Nursing is a rewarding career for people who like helping others.
At forty, she switched to a completely different career.
verbintransitive
To rush forward at high speed in a wild, hard-to-control way.
Grammar: No object; usually followed by a direction word: the truck careered down the hill.
Patterns
- career down something
- career into something
The runaway cart careered down the steep street.
A skier careered off the track and into the trees.
The bus careered across the road before it stopped.
Word forms
| plural | careers |
|---|---|
| third person singular | careers |
| past tense | careered |
| past participle | careered |
| -ing form | careering |
Common combinations
- build a career
- He built a career in journalism over thirty years.
- career path
- Her career path took her from intern to director.
- career change
- A career change can be scary but exciting.
- launch a career
- The award helped launch her career as a singer.
- career prospects
- Language skills improve your career prospects abroad.
- career break
- She took a career break to care for her father.
Synonyms and how they differ
- profession
- Profession usually names a field needing special training, such as law, while career stresses the whole progression of someone's working life.
- occupation
- Occupation is a neutral, often official word for what someone does for work, with no sense of progress over time.
- job
- A job is one specific position, whereas a career can include many jobs.
- vocation
- Vocation suggests a calling one feels drawn to, rather than just the path of employment.
Opposites
Word family
- careerist noun
- a person who cares mostly about advancing in their job, often used critically
- careers noun
- used before a noun for guidance about work, as in a careers adviser
- careering adjective
- moving fast and out of control
Commonly confused: career or carrier?
career vs carrier
A carrier is someone or something that carries or transmits things, such as a mail carrier; it has nothing to do with a working life.
Practice
After twenty years in teaching, Maria decided to ______ a new career in software.
Choose one answer.
Launch a career means to start one. You spend or hold a job, but you do not hold or lose a career to begin something new.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “career”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.