Complete Career Overview For The Sims 1

Getting a job for your adult Sims was critical in The Sims, with bills to pay and mouths to feed (and plenty of natural difficulty in doing both). Whether it’s through the newspaper or from a computer, you’ll likely want to get your Sims a job sooner than later.

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It helps to know what you might expect from that job, especially since career choices are far more limited in this earliest entry of the series. There are 21 jobs available in The Sims Legacy Edition, each of which has its own skill requirements you’ll need to meet along the way.

Get A Job You Can Handle Working Every Day

Find A Job, And Make Sure To Catch Your Ride On Time

Getting a job in the first Sims game is relatively straightforward, but your choices are severely limited each day. While later installments of the series allowed us to simply choose any career path at will, to get a job in the original Sims, you’ll need to use the newspaper or a computer to Find a Job. If using the newspaper, you’ll only see one job option each day, while the computer provides three. These refresh at midnight each night, if you’re not keen on any that day and want to try looking again tomorrow.

Each day, you’ll see a popup that the carpool will arrive in one hour, which is your cue from the game to start getting your Sim ready to leave for work. No matter which job you choose, a car is sent for you one hour before your shift, arriving at the lot precisely an hour beforehand and leaving at one minute to the hour before your shift at work is meant to begin. Even if you’re right next to the vehicle at 59 past the hour, the carpool will leave if you’re not inside by that time.

You can’t go to work that day if you miss the carpool, so you’ll need to be ready for work earlier than you may think. Sims take some time to path-find in this game, and walking is a bit slow. It’s a good idea to begin heading out to your carpool no later than 20 minutes after the hour when it arrives, or more depending on the size of your home and the yard space between the door and the road.

On the bright side, your carpool improves as you get promoted throughout your career, beginning as an old clunker and potentially even upgrading all the way to a limousine! It doesn’t make a difference in the hour time allotment you have, but it’s a neat detail. You can’t follow your Sim to work, but it’s always wise to send them to work in a good mood, since they’re unlikely to be promoted with a mood in the red.

You’re Expected To Work Every Day (But You Don’t Really Need To)

Unlike later entries in the series, the original Sims never got a real calendar system, and as such, your Sim is scheduled to go to work every single day. They don’t have time off, there aren’t weekends, and they don’t accrue holiday pay over the span of their careers. No matter your mood or the state of your Sim’s home lot, you’re expected at work right at the start of your shift each day.

If you miss a single shift, you’ll receive a phone call from your job with a verbal warning that you’ve missed a day and are on thin ice. There doesn’t seem to be much consequence if you go back to work the following day, though, so in place of days off or weekends, you may want to occasionally skip work to tend to your Sim.

Since there’s not much time in the day after work for Sims to care for themselves, tend to relationships, build skills, and relax, it can be wise to use these days for working toward your next promotion. Need another friend before you can get promoted but don’t have time to meet anyone new? Skip work one day and head to a public lot, shake some hands, do some chatting, and make that final friend before your shift the following day when you return to work as normal.

Sims Need Family Friends For Promotions

They say it’s all about who you know at work sometimes, and though your boss doesn’t seem to care who you know precisely, they sure want you to at least know someone! In the original Sims, you need set numbers of friends to earn promotions, so in addition to building your career-related skills, you’ll need to do some talking about interests and joking with the passers-by on the sidewalk outside.

One decent way around this is that the game factors in family friends instead of individual friends. This means that if you have two Sims in a household, both of them are making friends for the family, and everyone seems to be everyone’s friend. Your job requires family friends, so some players work around this by having an additional Sim in the house whose goal is to socialize with the town and make friends for the household.

You’ll Have An Offer To Switch Career Tracks

Though it’s always a set track, unlike it tends to be in later Sims games, when your Sims hit higher points in their chosen career, they’ll receive an offer to change jobs to something else if they’re looking for a change of pace. These are often jobs with similar requirements, like how Military members can join the Law Enforcement career or Sims in the Medicine track could receive an offer to become a Scientist, while others seem a bit more randomly chosen, like how Musicians can move to the Paranormal career.

This will occur once you’ve reached the top level of your chosen career, if you want to do something different going forward, so plenty of your skills will cross over should you decide to accept. You’re not forced to make this move, but if you’re looking for something to change your game a bit and aren’t committed fully to your original career, it may be worth pursuing.

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All Careers In The Sims

Below, we’ve included a table of every job you can take in the original Sims game, including every expansion that came with The Sims Legacy Edition. This table includes the skills you’ll be expected to build throughout your career, and both your starting and top daily pay.

Every Job In The Sims

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