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Choosing Your Lifetime Career

You’ve cleared high school and the clock is ticking towards your eighteenth birthday. There is no doubt adulthood is fast approaching and soon you’ll be expected to defend your new status- ‘adult’, by acting like one (being independent and responsible). Gladly, your guardians/parents have your back. They have committed themselves to ensuring that when adulthood catches up with you, you’ll be in a position to pay your bills and probably manage your own family. For this reason, they pump their hard earned money into your tertiary/higher education; and your career journey begins.

Have You Made the Right Career Choice?

At this point, I would like to sneak in a question, for the purpose of redirection, in case you’re using a faulty compass. Have you settled on a particular career choice, because it’s prestigious, marketable, or affordable, or is it because it matches your abilities and potential? 

 Actually, any career can pay your bills, but a career that matches your abilities and potential will not only pay your bills, but will also maximize your potential and bring you fulfillment.
Nevertheless, picking the right career is quite a process and a poorly informed decision, can set someone off on the wrong direction. This is because most people are multi-talented and can excel in various professions. However, excelling in a given profession, does not guarantee fulfillment. Instead, fulfillment is achieved when one pursues a career that best suits their abilities and optimizes their potential.

Consequence of pursuing the Wrong Career

Most career men and women out there may be pursuing careers of their choice, but majority of them are not in their exact right careers/fields. Meaning they made inaccurate choices. For this reason, their potential banks are underutilized. When one’s potential is underutilized, a draining feeling of unfulfillment sets in. In such eventuality, people often resort to all manner of therapies to cure this disturbing feeling. Unfortunately, those therapies can only offer temporary relief. This is because the actual cure to unfulfillment is opening the outlets of your potential bank and letting it flow through the right channels to water its choice fields. I.e. to conquer unfulfillment, you need to unlock and optimize your potential. Hence, the importance of making an accurate career choice cannot be overemphasized. 

Choose Your Lifetime Career

Below is a list of careers that you can choose to pursue. From this list, pick all the professions that you think you can excel in based on your abilities. Once you’ve listed down your most ideal professions, sort them out in ascending order starting with the one that best fits your interests, followed by the second best in that order.
List of Careers (NB: this list is reasonably inclusive but not exhaustive)
1.       Accountant
2.       Actor/actress
3.       Actuary
4.       Administrator
5.       Architect
6.       Auditor
7.       Banker
8.       Beauty therapist
9.       Carpenter
10.    Chef
11.    Clergy
12.    Counselor
13.    Data analyst
14.    Doctor
15.    Driver
16.    Economist
17.    Electrician
18.    Engineer
19.    Entrepreneur
20.    Event planner
21.    Farmer
22.    Fashion designer
23.    Fine artist
24.    Fitness instructor
25.    Flight attendant
26.    Forester
27.    Graphic designer
28.    Hair stylist
29.    Historian
30.    Household manager
31.    Human resources specialist
32.    Image consultant
33.    Interior designer
34.    Interpreter/translator
35.    IT specialist
36.    Jeweler
37.    Journalist
38.    Laboratory technician
39.    Lawyer
40.    Lecturer
41.    Legislator
42.    Librarian
43.    Loan officer
44.    Logistician
45.    Marketer
46.    Mechanic
47.    Model
48.    Musician
49.    News anchor
50.    Nurse
51.    Nutritionist
52.    Pharmacist
53.    Photographer
54.    Pilot
55.    Plumber
56.    Poet
57.    Police man/woman
58.    Political analyst
59.    Psychologist
60.    Public relations specialist
61.    Researcher
62.    Scientist
63.    Security expert
64.    Social worker
65.    Sports man/woman
66.    Surveyor
67.    Talk show host
68.    Teacher
69.    Travel agent
70.    Veterinarian
71.    Water resource specialist
72.    Writer

Illustration

Assuming you now have the sorted list of your choice careers, allow me to illustrate the significance of your decision using Mapuli’s case. Mapuli is a young adult who upon graduating from high school, went to college, graduated and started working. However, she finds her career (accountancy) unfulfilling and believes her potential is underutilized. To resolve her dilemma, she decides to seek help from a career adviser.
After narrating her experience, the career adviser hands her a list of careers like the one above and instructs her to pick her preferred professions from the list. Mapuli is multi-talented and so she ends up with a list of eighteen professions. Further, the young adult is required to sort out her list sequentially starting with the most suitable to the least suitable (suitable in this case represents degree of potential optimization). Below is her final list.
1.       Counselor- Most suitable
2.       Psychologist
3.       Writer
4.       Entrepreneur
5.       Researcher
6.       Actuary
7.       Human resources specialist
8.       Musician
9.       Data analyst
10.    Lawyer
11.    Image consultant
12.    Model
13.    Clergy
14.    Farmer
15.    Banker
16.    Accountant– Present Career
17.    Auditor
18.    Lecturer- Least suitable
As mentioned above, Mapuli is multi-talented and in this case, she can excel in as many as eighteen different fields. However, if she decides to pursue any of the careers at the bottom of her list, her potential will be underutilized and she will end up feeling unfulfilled. On the other hand, pursuing the top listed careers will lead to potential optimization hence fulfillment.
At the end of the session, Mapuli is able to identify the fields where she needs to channel her energy so as to utilize her abilities fully and become fulfilled. Together with her career adviser, they conclude that she needs to start investing in her top choice(s), for a better and fulfilling career life.

Start Off Right

Mapuli represents many people in the working population. As a young person starting your career journey, you should make the most ideal choice or risk becoming an addition to the statistics. Mark you, pursuing an unfulfilling career is such an unpleasant experience, you don’t want to have. Start off on the right foot and avoid the wasteful and stressful process of career change in future. A wise person learns from the experience of others. Therefore, get a pen and a notebook, pick, sort and identify the career that will maximize your abilities. And as you do that, keep in mind the quote that says, ‘where there’s a will there’s a way’.

Awesome Career Guide Books at Christianbook.com

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