A Journey Of Career Discovery
The Discovery of your passionate career is a process. It's a journey you have to start now as a student because the earlier you discover those things you're good at, the faster you move towards the right career path.
If precious stones are discovered after a thorough search beneath the earth's surface, the same way, special things of this life are not found easily. They are hidden and requires a substantial amount of hard work and creativity, in other to discover them.
The same principle is at play in your strife to discover the right career path for yourself. In every journey, whether it's a day journey or a decade journey, the common factor is that you must take a step to start the journey. The journey is a process you have to start with a decision manifested through a step. The right step.
Your journey to career discovery is a structured process followed by well-thought-out steps. These steps, if efficiently followed, have the potential of helping you achieve a feat, that many have wished for in their career life but didn't know how to make it happen. Let's look at those steps.
The steps
Every journey starts with a step and continues by taking more steps. Here are the steps that you need, to start your journey of career discovery and probably help you achieve success while in the process.
1.Fortify yourself
2. Discover yourself
3. Explore careers
4. Develop needed skills to build your career
5. Motivate yourself to pursue your goals.
Fortify yourself
The word fortify means to protect or strengthen oneself against attacks. Anything that can make you fail to discover your right career path is an attack on your mission. Every meaningful journey has roadblocks and attacks dotted along its route.
Making plans on how to tackle these envisaged attacks goes a long way in determining the success of the journey. We are going to discuss here, qualities that serve as building blocks for constructing your forte. Some of those qualities are open-mindedness, humility, perseverance, and self-control.
Open-mindedness: This will be very helpful for you during the career exploration process. It is the ability to welcome new ideas. To explore is to try new things and you can't be good at trying new things if you're not open-minded. An insatiable thirst for knowledge and the discovery of new opportunities can only be achieved with open-mindedness.
Humility: Humility simply means freedom from pride or arrogance. It will help you in building rapport and facilitating learning. The more humble you are, the more resilient you can be. It requires humility for you to fail many times and still get up to try once again. During the stage of skill development, you need to be humble, in other to learn the needed skills fast.
When I graduated as a computer engineer and wanted to build some skills in v-sat installation and networking. I had a friend who's an expert in this field but not a graduate and also my junior. But for me to learn those skills that I need, I have to humble myself. I carry the toolbox that we'll use to work on sites and he sends me on errands.
For the fact that I respect him as my master, he becomes much willing to teach me everything that I need to know. And within a short period, I'm so good in the field that I was selected as one of the field engineers during the NICEP project sponsored by the Nigerian government.
Your humility is what helps you build a good rapport with the boss. On the other hand, your boss will be willing to teach you what you need to know because you humbly wants to learn.
Perseverance: Who said that the journey will be easy? On this journey, you'll encounter setbacks, delays, and disappointments. All those things will make you consider careers that are closer to your reach but not a good fit for your personality. If you can truly ask yourself, why do precious stones not found at the surface? then you should see reasons why you should persevere to mine for your passionate career.
Self-control: Self-control is very important if you want to set your priorities right. Inability to set your priorities right can single-handedly make your dream of discovering your passionate career not see the light of the day. You'll have to make sacrifices in other to get what you want.
Buying good shoes and clothes will make you look fine, but ought not to be at the expense of needed training and certifications. You should know what suppose to come first and the one that supposes to follow it. Do the most important things first.
Having equipped yourself with the needed qualities. The next thing you should do is to discover yourself.
Discover yourself
Self-discovery is what points you to the north star. It's what shows you the right direction to follow. It's your compass. Knowing who you are, increases the chances of making the right career choice. It's only when you know yourself, that you'll know what's right for you. Discovering yourself is all about knowing your values, interests, and personality. Let us take them one after the other.
Values: Your values are the ideas and beliefs that are important to you. They determine your priorities. Life is much easier and enjoyable when you acknowledge your values and endeavor to make plans and decisions that honor them. If you value creativity, then you won't like to settle for a career that discourages individual creativity in the workplace.
Interest: Your interest are those things that you enjoy doing. For example, reading, traveling, writing, sporting and many others. Any career path that comprises tasks that you do not enjoy is a misfit. You cannot love such a career because it does not capture your interest.
Personality: Personality can be referred to as characteristic patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that make a person unique. You can never think creatively or feel passionate about a career that's not compatible with your personality. By understanding your personality, you can easily identify those careers that you're passionate about.
If you can identify your values and strongly stand by them, believe in, and pursue your ideas with great interest and no fear of criticism, then you've truly discovered yourself. Now that you've known who you are, then go ahead to explore careers in other to discover your career fit.
Explore Careers
Now is the time to fantasize and then act on your fantasy. Dream big and start working towards your dream. Look far into the horizon and ask yourself, what excites me most when I think about the future?
By putting your values, interests, attitudes, and personality into consideration, a picture of the future you want will start taking shape in your mind. The mind is the factory where all dreams and ideas are manufactured.
Now, you've got a picture of the future you visualize, you have to ask yourself, what skills and experiences do you need most, in other to achieve this future?
Your career exploration is the act of working in two or more careers that captures your interest, in other to see how compatible they are with your personality and also learn and develop the needed skills that will help you achieve the future you visualize.
There are many ways you can explore a career. You can do that as an intern, an apprentice, a contract staff, a part-time or a full-time employee. As a student, internships are the best way for you to go about this career exploration and skills development.
Getting an internship in the desired career helps you to explore that career as a learner and also gain some vital skills and real work experience while on the job. That's the major reason we created our stock management internship program so that students who want to explore and gain some professional experience in the field of business can do that with us while in school. To be part of our internship program, you can apply HERE.
Having explored a few careers, your major target now is to focus on that single career path where you're self-motivated to work, because of its compatibility with your natural abilities. It's only at such a place can you happily build your career without struggling.
Develop needed skills to build your career
Have you ever thought about the reason, why companies sent their staffs to seminars, conferences, and training? The answer is skills development. If the staffs have the latest skills in the marketplace, then, they'll be able to render services that can give them an edge over the competition.
Discovering the right career for yourself is just only the beginning of your career journey. You'll have to do a lot of learning, unlearning, and relearning, in other to develop the right and latest skills that can give you a competitive edge if you still want to keep your job. If not, you'll see yourself struggling in a career that supposes to be your second nature.
The only way to avoid being left in the dark is to continue learning and developing new skills in other to build your career. Without continuous learning, you've chosen to be at the level where you fight over little crumbs with the majority.
The set of people that are most hit with this inability to engage in continuous skill development are self-employed. Once they manage to acquire a skill that will help them open a shop or an office, they'll continue working with such skill till the skill is so outdated that they can't feed themselves any longer with skill.
That's when they'll start making some efforts in other to upgrade themselves so that their family won't continue going hungry. That's not how it's supposed to be. Skill development ought to be a continuous process if you always want to stay at the top of your career.
Motivate yourself to pursue your goals
If you are motivated enough to pursue a given career without anybody jeering you to work, then You're at the right place. Self-motivation is the keyword here.
If you're in the right career, you'll be self-motivated in pursuing excellence. Nobody motivates you to work. You don't even have a given time for working in the career. You work on it any time you get the prompt. As I'm typing this, the time is 03:57 am in the morning.
I'm working on this piece at this time of the day because I'm self-motivated to work in this task. I didn't see it as work, because I enjoy what I'm doing. It's where I want to be. If you are at the right career, trust me, you can never struggle to make a living if you play your cards well.
Instead of struggling, you're being innovative. No one tells you to upgrade and develop your skills, but rather you're self-motivated to do so even when such new skills are not yet fully adopted by society.
You can only make a difference if you're at your best. Choose that career that puts you at your best and work on it as if your life depends on it. No matter how good you are in your field, hard work is the only thing that can help you achieve excellence.
It's easier for you to work hard on a job you love than the one you don't love. You can go to any length in pursuit of your goal if you're passionate about your career. Let's close with Confucius. He says "Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life."
Will you like to enhance your entrepreneurial literacy while in school? Our internship program might be the right place for you to start. Click HERE to apply.
