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The standard advice that most job search professionals give is to ask everyone you know for advice in finding a job. However, one exception to that rule may be your parents. As odd as it may sound, mom and dad may be a bad place to turn for job search advice. Here’s why:

A Clarification

We should point out here that the following information is not a blanket statement. Your parents may well be the perfect people to ask for job search advice. Therefore, you should take the following ideas with a grain of salt.

Emotional Involvement

Your parents of course love you deeply and they want the best for you. You in turn likely have strong feelings for them and will tend to listen to their advice more so than others. The thing is, finding a job is not and can never be an emotional decision. While you do need to enjoy the job you are doing, you also need to treat finding a job as a business decision. When relatives get involved, this can sometimes be more difficult precisely because there is an emotional factor involved. Again, this doesn’t mean that asking your parents for job search advice is a bad idea. It’s just that it could become more complicated.

Different Culture of Work

This one is really aimed at middle age people looking for work rather than those who are just entering the work force. That’s because as a middle aged person, your parents are likely members of the baby boomer generation. For the boomers, the idea of finding a single job and sticking to it for the rest of your life is considered to be the holy grail of job hunting. However, in today’s modern world, relatively few people stay with a single company for their entire lives. Careers are much more fluid and as such, your parents’ job search advice, while certainly well intentioned may not be the most useful to finding the right job for you.

The Nag Factor

Again, this is not an indictment of all parents and certainly not intended to disparage anyone. However, if you are living at home, your parents may want to get you out the door. This is actually a good thing – living at home as an adult stunts your emotional growth and makes it much more difficult to land good jobs in the future.

That said, your parents, well meaning though they may be, may push you to take a job which is totally inappropriate for you, either because it involves very long hours for minimal pay or because it is a job which you are simply not qualified to take on.

Either way, this can often lead to disaster as you may not be able to take the right job when it does come along (either because you are too busy working the dead end job or because you got fired from a job which you were clearly not qualified for and now have a tainted work history).

An Alternative Nag Factor

Finally, there is what might be called the “alternative nag factor” as a reason for not involving your parents in your job search. They may run a successful business which they want you to join. However, if that business simply doesn’t interest you, asking your parents for job search advice may well backfire, with you being nagged to join the family business since you can’t find a “real job.”

Bottom Line

As with anything, you should take this advice with a grain of salt. Your parents may well have great job search advice for you on how to find a job. However, it’s also possible that their advice may not be the most appropriate for your particular situation. Ultimately, it’s up to you to decide what you should be doing with your own life.

Frankie Eybsen is a career blogger for ResumeBucket, the site with the largest collection of sample resumes.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 2nd, 2011 at 8:31 am and is filed under Career, Job Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.