A job is a single paid position or task, while a career is the wider series of jobs someone has over their working life, especially in one field. Landing a job at a hospital is one step; building a long career in journalism is the whole path.
The core difference
A job is one position; a career is the ongoing sequence of jobs that makes up someone's working life.
- job — a paid position or a particular piece of work: She finally landed a job at the local hospital.
- career — the series of jobs someone has over their working life: She built a long career in journalism.
How to tell them apart
Scale is the main difference. A job is a single position you hold, or even just a task to complete, like painting the fence is a job for the weekend. A career is the bigger picture: the whole sequence of jobs someone moves through, often within one field, as in he switched careers in his forties to become a teacher.
Career can also describe someone doing something as a long-term profession, as in a career diplomat, marking it out from a casual or temporary role. Job, meanwhile, has looser, informal uses too, such as calling a heist a job, which shows how far the everyday word has stretched beyond the paid-position sense.
