Sims2: Jobs and Careers

Her fifth baby born, Rita returns to work after a brief maternity leave.  She wants to get back to the office, and Cassidy is going to stay home with the kids for a while.  Rita is a journalist and loves her job, even though right now she's just a blog writer.  She's eager to get back to work because she's in line for a promotion, and she thinks she can climb the corporate ladder pretty well if she can just start getting enough sleep.

There are, I think, 29 different careers Sims can have.  Each has ten levels that your Sim can get promoted through, as long as they have the correct levels in skills and enough friends.  In the challenge I'm playing, Sims only have these jobs if reaching the highest level of that career is their "Lifetime Want".  This is something that is set when a Sim reaches teenagehood, or is determined when you start playing a new Sim you created.  You can't directly change Lifetime Wants, but they are tied to the Aspiration of the Sim.  For example, only a Sim with Romance Aspiration will have a lifetime want for "Golden Anniversary", which is 50 years with their chosen spouse.

Rita has the Knowledge aspiration (one of my favourites), and these Sims do often get career goals as their Lifetime Wants.  Cassidy has Pleasure aspiration (one of my least favourites), and his Lifetime Want is to have 20 pet best friends, which is one I normally ignore.

As I mentioned, it takes skills and friends to get a promotion.  There's also a green kind of thermometer thingie, that fills as they work, then goes down at every new level.  It takes longer to fill at each stage.  If your Sim is too tired, uncomfortable, or lonely when they go to work, it takes even longer.  (If they are hungry or need the bathroom when you send them to work, they will eat or use the washroom while they're there, so that's not as much of an issue).  You can get a promotion in another way, which is if a Chance Card pops up.  These are funny situations related to each career, always with two choices (and a button to ignore, but I never do that, because where's the fun there?).  I pretty quickly learned that both choices can be right or wrong, and you have a 50/50 chance of getting the promotion.  If you choose the wrong one, your Sim can be either demoted or fired.  There is a lifetime aspiration benefit that increases the probability of picking the right choice 80% of the time.  

It's going to be tricky to get Rita to the highest level of her career, a "media magnate", since she also rolled to have five kids, and that has kept her at home for more than half of her adult life stage.  Fortunately Sims are not required to retire when they get to the Elder life stage, so she can keep working towards that want.  Cassidy, well... he's just out of luck.