by Tim Rosenberger

Now, with the arrival of the New Year, it may be good to take stock in what has been accomplished during 2014. Are you where you want to be? An indicator for some can be their job. Are you truly in a career that makes you happy?

Based on two surveys, one conducted by Carreerbuilder.com and The Walt Disney Co. in 2007 and another by LinkedIn.com in 2012, the chances of getting your dream job are low. In fact, you have a 30 percent chance according to the 2012 survey and a measly 16 percent if you go off the 2007 survey.

For 28 year-old Jeremy Lehman, just finding a job to live off of has been a struggle. Lehman owes around $100,000 in student loans – he attended four different colleges and had three different majors before graduating in 2013 from Illinois State University with a Bachelors in public relations.

Lehman figures he has to make $16 an hour to keep up with his student loans. The leftover money would only allow for poverty living.

So he has been applying for every job under the sun from ordinary minimum wage jobs to higher paying ones to PR related positions. Out of the 10 to 12 public relation jobs he has gone out for, all have turned him down.

These setbacks have not swayed his enthusiasm for public relations. He sees PR as a great chance to be creative.

“There’s no one set way to do PR right,” he said. “It always changes, and that keeps it interesting. Every client that you work with is going to have different needs, and so that keeps you on your toes.”

Lehman is convinced his failure to obtain a position in PR is due to having only one internship during college and his lack of experience outside the classroom. Even crawling before he can walk, getting more internships before going for a full-time position, has proven difficult.

With prospects of getting the type of job he wants being so grim, he may not ever reach his goals. Still, he remains optimistic. Every job, minimum wage or not, offers its own experiences that can help later.

“You can’t take big steps,” he said. “You got to find the small steps, because when you find the small steps [and] you know they’re there, you can get to them. It might be a bit slow, but you’ll get there.”

It is important to note that despite how much he wants one, a PR position is not required for Lehman to be happy. He only needs to be able to live comfortably and enjoy what he is doing.

Lyle Benefield, store manager of eight Walgreens stores in Central Illinois, certainly enjoys what he does despite being in a field that many try to avoid. He has been with Walgreens since June 27, 1977, when he was only 16.

Starting out as a cook back when Walgreens served food, Benefield did not see the job as a stepping stone to a career. At that point in his life, he did not have any ideas for possible career paths. He heard about the opening through his brother – who joined Walgreens two months earlier and is also still with the company – and took it so he could buy a car.

A year-and-a-half in, he was offered an assistant manager position. This was the first time he started thinking of the job as a career. Over time, he worked in five different stores and opened three.

Retail sees employees come and go on a regular basis. Whether it is fair or not, retail work also has a negative stigma attached to it. Often it has the reputation of being lower work doled out to people who did not get any higher education or to those who simply got stuck in the job.

Benefield does not see the job that way. He thinks most of the people who have that assessment of retail do not know the job and have not experienced it. For him, retail is just as important as a position at Caterpillar and the educational possibilities are great.

“I can tell you right now, there are people that enter Walgreens right at entry level that you can learn from as much or more than anybody else,” Benefield said. “Everybody has something to bring to the table to learn from.”

His lengthy career in the company comes down to the opportunities offered him; the variety in the day-to-day work; the people he gets to know, from the employees to the customers; and the chance to help others.

“Just the satisfaction of carrying something out for someone [is wonderful],” Benefield said. “We had a lady in here one day, she had a flat tire. I changed her tire, and she was just ecstatic about it. Sometimes the little things mean a lot to people.”

When he was 26, Benefield almost left the company for Diamond Star Motors, but he stayed on because he wanted to be a manager in a different environment than DSM was offering. He has not had any regrets about that decision or about his career as a whole.

That is not to say dreams cannot be accomplished. Lindsey Steidinger has thought about being a teacher since she was little. The dream solidified when she was 14 and went on a mission trip to Guatemala, where she worked at a number of schools.

Steidinger, who graduated from ISU in 2013, majored in communication studies teacher education and minored in English, which means she can teach public speech and English classes.

This fall she started teaching general education English at Poston Butte High School in San Tan Valley, Ariz.

Steidinger finds high school a formative time for kids, and she enjoys imparting life lessons along with the rules of grammar.

The hardest part of being a teacher is finding a school that is a good fit, Steidinger believes. Thankfully, the high school she is at is a perfect fit due to the great administration, which has a principle that probably knows every kid by name.

“We really focus on the school culture and getting kids involved,” Steidinger said. “It’s just a really great system. I really feel it’s a school where we work hard to get kids to achieve. I sometimes tell kids that I work harder for their grades than they do, because we really just push to make them achieve their best.”

She would like to someday teach a public speaking class but it is not a required subject in Arizona so there is not a current need for it. Steidinger does want to get the administration to push for it, however.

Poston Butte, having opened in 2009, continues to grow. Steidinger feels safe in her job knowing that it is a good area to be a teacher.

She loves what she does and would not want to be anywhere else, but if she ever lost her passion for teaching or the administration was not on the same page as her, she would want to move on to something new if only to be fair to the students, who need passionate teachers.

Getting her dream job was not easy and she would advise anyone pursuing their dream to be willing to do anything to get the job.

“I really had to be willing to work for what I wanted, and while I’ve been fortunate to the land the job I specifically wanted right away, I think that you have to be willing to sort of keep throwing your life up in the air and changing things until you get there,” Steidinger said.

If Steidinger had stayed in Illinois, where she says there is an overabundance of teachers, she would not have the type of position she has today. She thinks you have to be willing to risk it all to get where you want to go.

But life can get in the way of dreams. So thinks Kerri Rae Hinman. She works at Trillium Staffing in Morton but her major interests lie in acting, which she has being doing since she was a kid doing church plays.

Hinman thinks her thirst for acting partly stemmed from being made fun of a lot in school. Acting gave her the chance to be someone she was not and to show off her talents.

She became serious about acting in high school and doubled majored in acting and communications in college.

“It’s a real art,” Hinman said. “You can inspire people. It opens people’s minds. You can learn so much more about people and humans and learn how to connect with people. I mean, it’s life. It’s everything. To me it’s beautiful.”

Beyond community theater, she has not tried out for anything lately, but she has often thought about going to Chicago and training in Second City. Her goal through high school and college was to one day act professionally and be able to support herself off it.

“When you grow up and you get out into the real world, things aren’t…it’s like ‘follow your dreams, follow your dreams, follow your dreams’ all through school,” Hinman said. “You can only do that to a certain point.”

Hinman’s family has experienced health issues the past couple years. That has made her more reluctant to pursue acting far away from Central Illinois.

Along with her ties to family, money has been her primary barrier to accomplishing her dream, but she has not completely given up on it.

“I can’t say I’ve actively been going to any auditions or anything lately, but it’s always in the back of my mind,” she said. “If something came up, I’d definitely go.”