13520
Personal and Professional Challenges: Past and Present
TOEFL Essay Topic 20130526 China
Jeenn Lee Hsieh
ielts360toefl@hotmail.com
EssayTopic:
Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? The personal and work-related challenges that young people face today are not very different from the challenges their parents and grandparents faced in the past.
Use reasons and specific examples or details to support your answer.
Example Writing:
The last half a century or so have witnessed the greatest revolution since Genesis, referring particularly to the technological development which has changed both the way people live and the way they work. Our grandparents certainly did not anticipate this to happen, and probably our parents were also taken by surprise. It can be realized that people of different age groups differ to different degrees when facing their personal and professional challenges in different periods of modern history.
Speaking of a range of work-related issues, these days the separation between generations is even stronger than, say, between nations because of the globalized career challenge. To say the least, from then to now what is making the difference about those changes is that the tempo is quicker and the speed is faster in the workplace. Specifically, it was then when the computer (and along with it the Internet) did not exist. And it is now when telecommuting or working from home (WFH) is becoming increasingly common. Thus, the young working people are experiencing the universal challenge: mental and physical stress due to time pressure and peer competition not easily seen before. In comparison, the challenge facing older people were not like that, though.
The mainstream personal lifestyles have changed as well, thanks to the arrival of the Information Age along with some new challenges. For example, people-to-people communication tends to be less personal. With that, face-to-face contacts between families and friends in general have gradually become less common due to the popularity of cell phones and text messages. As another negative challenge, the work-life balance among the young parents appears to be more difficult today than it used to be only decades ago. Nowadays, people's living standards are obviously higher, if not necessarily better, than once upon a time. However, a related challenge is perhaps that it is much more expensive to live a modern life, as if to indicate that such a change in personal life is not always good.
On the whole, during about five decades of technological innovations, people of different generations have met different challenges in personal life as well as in professional life. In the past, life in both respects was easier and less complex that it is today, to be sure. For that matter, it is up to our parents and our grandparents to tell the different challenges they really felt in the past. (Essay created by Jeenn Lee Hsieh)
