What Kind of Stress Comes with the Job Market?

Although we often do not think of getting a job order as a stressful event, perhaps it really could be when we are forced to choose between competing offers. As is common in life, no decision is ever really perfectly clear cut and simple.

For that reason, we must almost always way the advantages and disadvantages before we eventually decide what to do. However, remember that with the three types of stress, different decisions and different conflicts can cause different types of stress. However, suppose we are entering the job field and are forced to consider several different job options, how would we receive and deal with stress from this situation?

Perhaps much of the answer deals in the nature of the job. Often, even though we would really like to work and get a job, we must make sacrifices for that particular job. Perhaps the hours are not exactly what we were looking for or the pay is less than we might have expected.

However, despite these factors, it is still necessary that we work. With that in mind, it seems as though we often deal with approach-avoidance conflicts when looking at the job market. When given a choice between alternatives that have both positive and negative aspects, we deem this to be an approach-avoidance conflict, which is almost always the case when we are looking at different job offers.

Suppose we are looking at the case of a college graduate. After getting his diploma, he is forced to consider any number of job offers. Would he be stressed in this example? Certainly he would have a lot information to weigh and a lot of decisions to make, but the question lies in exactly how stressed he would be.

While it is likely that our imaginary student would face some stress, perhaps not so much because of the competing job offers and the sheer amount of choices which are available to him. Yes, we can agree, it would be a stressful situation, but not nearly as bad as it could be. It may even be that the very idea of having different jobs to choose from would alleviate stress instead of increase it.

By far, though, the most stressful thing would be weighing the different benefits of each job. It is certain that none of the competing job offers would be exactly perfect, but that they would all have different advantages and disadvantages. One might require our student to move, while another may force him to work for less than he might have wanted to. Probably, when talking about a freshly graduated student, money is going to be more of an issue, with loans and such to repay, than is going to be traveling.

Of course, certain factors may also lend themselves to increasing or decreasing stress. For example, if the student had a long time to make his decision and weight the different jobs, he would be far less stressed than if he had to make a decision quickly and did not have time to really think about what he was doing. It would also be less stressful if the student is considering his first job after college instead of debating whether or not he should leave his current job for another one.

All in all, the decisions we make when we enter the workforce can definitely be said to have stressful elements attached to them. However, when we really weight the consequences of different decisions and think about how they can affect us, we can generally relive a lot the potential stress that we might have been feeling. When we talk about internal conflicts and the ways in which we can deal with them, perhaps the best method is to simply relax and take it easy.