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Lawyers, teachers, doctors, nurses. How many occupations can you name? What does a mycologist or a pharmacologist do? Career-wise, how does one get career wise? Well, having a basic idea of what one wants to do with life is always the beginning.
For some of us who are unsure of what we want to do as a profession; there are career assessment tests available over the internet for as much as rs.200, a persons aptitude can be checked with a one hour exam that will tell you what kind of a job your personality is more suited for. For more information, click on the link; www.careersindia.com
Good career decisions require good information, about the career you want to choose and about your own understanding of yourself, your personal qualities, your preferences and about the world of work. Career counselors, your teachers at college should be able to assist you in getting started by helping you to identify and express your skills, aptitudes, values, personality traits and interests as they all relate to a successful career choice. For many people in my years of college, the beginning of successful careers has been in taking simple Intelligence Quotient, Emotional Quotient and Aptitude tests. Most of these tests are available on the internet or if your college does not give them, than the local universities should.
Information: about the world of work is everywhere, in newspaper’ classifieds or on the internet. These days’ television shows can often influence a person’s view of specific occupations. Government departments and professional associations publish a lot of information in regular periodicals like “career assessment” and “competition success”. Personal contacts are extremely valuable, often providing “up-close and private” views of occupations which is one of the reasons why consultancies all over India have been very successful in guiding people looking for jobs.
It’s really important for us to be social in this area for us to be able to go over to someone who we barely know who may be able to help us in finding a job, to strike up a conversation in order to develop an acquaintanceship and friendship that may be very productive. The mentoring and direction that well informed friends and consultants give you can help you develop professional networks.
It’s important to stay up to date with what the trends are, when assessing a career that you are interested in, it is very important to do “homework”. I recently had to go for an interview at an outsourcing company, usually I would check over the internet for a website of the company that I was interested in, I would look for a press release on the newspaper website’s in order to get a bit of information that may prove to be a “tipping point” in my interview, but for no reason other than over-confidence I didn’t look up the company website for information. I showed up at the interview trigger happy and hey presto, they asked me “So young man, why would you like to join our company and how can you contribute to what we do”? I had very little idea what they did. Later on, needless to say after failing the interview, I logged onto the net and the company up on google.com. They were a small enterprise, but they had an efficient and very informative website.
The information is out there, it’s in our everyday newspapers that battle for top spot with intelligent news that are positioned to be registered in our minds for moments that need the knowledge. On websites; the journey through thousands of career options begins with a single click.
The opportunity is out there: There is a no shortage of openings for choosing a career; from “Home Economics” to “Human Resource Management”. In India the scenario of work is constantly changing; our economy continues to grow and is in persistent upward direction. We have the fastest growing middle class in the world and over 75% of the country within the age group of 15-35 , which makes us the world’s youngest nation and one of the largest working populations on earth. There is growing need for students to give attention to the newer professions such as “Disaster management”; with a major national catastrophe affecting India on a regular basis there is a course that involves the development of strategy and fieldwork for the decrease of social disasters. The topics of interest include; “search and rescue, health, emergency management, engineering, agricultural and rural development, community management systems that enhance local preparedness, and post-disaster recovery”.
In Business Administration there is “knowledge management”, the definition of which is: “KM is the distribution, access and retrieval of unstructured information about "human experiences" between interdependent individuals or among members of a workgroup. Knowledge management involves identifying a group of people who have a need to share knowledge, developing technological support that enables knowledge sharing, and creating a process for transferring and distributing knowledge. For the last few years, colleges have constantly been introducing the “newer sciences”, psychology, sociology, and communications. Since their introduction, several students have joined these courses because of the “bad luck” of not being able to get hold of a seat in an engineering college or in an MBA program. Psychology is the study of human behavior and a very important field in emerging India especially in the cities with long work hours and a premature increase in health problems due stress several Indians are seeking professional help for their problems. Prepare to prepare to be prepared : To sort out the purpose of our lives we don’t need a planning commission. Preparation is a very important part of making a substantial career decision. Several people do not plan and that is why we see very highly qualified individuals like engineers in routine call center jobs, where before long the person sees life and success passing by; a waste of education. Students and professionals who want to continue with the IT boom in the other parts of the world like Germany, or those who plan a profession in other non-anglais speaking countries need to prepare to prepare to be prepared with new language skills, the world’s second language is no longer French contrary to popular belief, it is Spanish and those who aspire working in other non-English countries must be able to learn the language of that country in advance; during college of even earlier and better during higher-secondary education (intermediate). Planning is basically strategy; preparing yourself for the big boom. The inconsequence of not planning is the deep regret of watching your life’s dreams, aspirations, thoughts and ideas pass you by solely because the time and opportunity to plan was not taken. Like Preity Zinta says, the only way to make your dreams come true is to wake up . Those as role models: It is necessary for us to have role-models to look up to, wisdom from the experienced people is important not because we don’t have to try what they have already tried but because they can help us understand what they have learned in terms of the ways that don’t work and to try something else. The majority of us don’t have role models. We have flimsy quotations like “aim for the stars”, which are fine, but the point of role models is for us to be able to imitate a human person with the successes and failings that we all have, a person who has achieved things that are said to be unachievable. Mentorship, somebody to direct or probably push us in the right direction, why would that be important, because we have a largely useless primary education system that doesn’t help us learn the basic etiquette and protocol for job interviews, how many people in school can successfully say that school prepared them to face the world, it gave them their options about what they could do with their lives, it inspired and shaped their dreams to becomes pilots and doctors, lawyers, the influencers; movers and shakers of society, to think big and not settle for scrap jobs because that was what their gender or social status allotted them. Ultimatum: Finally, a career decision is yours; you have to decide what you are going to with your life, where do you see yourself in ten years. Are you a thoughtful, practical person who thinks hisher life through or are you chasing your dreams, both concepts of thinking are valid but it’s important to keep in mind the practicalities of thinking and thinking too much, Thomas Edison said that “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration”. Hard work is the key, life today has been made easier and the world is more accessible, the internet is out there, we get newspapers at our doorsteps, the different people in different professions come streaming into our homes everyday sometimes at 24 hours in over 200 different channels. Ultimately, it is all about choice. No one can make a decision about your life more effectively than you can, it involves a lot of thinking and some trying, some of us have shaped by our experiences to be journalists or teachers or doctors, it’s up to us individually to decide, am I a good communicator, am I an effective teacher, will I make a good lawyer. The best thing about opportunity is that if you work hard enough you can get someone to pay you for something you love doing. Chase those dreams, but practically like Thomas Edison proved and wakefully like Preity Zinta says.
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