An Evolving Trade

As a clerk, since I’ve been in I have seen my trade basically evolve and originally when I got in I was an administration clerk. Back in the 80’s they didn’t have all the same trades open that they do now for women. That’s funny because when I did my recruit training I was basically told that and after all this training, they kind of subtlely put it in your head that everything revolves around the infantry. So I said of course I want to be infantry and they said well you got to pick something else, we don’t have women in the infantry. And they said well obviously you can read, you’re in university so do you want to be a clerk? I go, “A Clerk? ” It seemed like a default. They said or you can be a medic because when somebody needed help out on the range during the course, you rendered first aid. And then they asked, and then again when you had the weapon you stripped it down to the point where we needed a weapons tech to put it back together again so you could be one of them. I don’t know. So I thought about it for a bit and I got back to them with an answer and I chose clerk because being in university I knew paperwork never ended so I figured that would be a good start. And then in the 90’s the trade changed again then I became a resource management support clerk where they combined administration and finance together. And not that long ago, a couple of years back they changed the trade again to now it’s human resources and financial support so the trade has seen some changes and I kind of adapt to go with those changes.