How to choose a career
From LakshyaWiki
Life is great when you are in school. You do your homework, study, play, watch movies and move along year after year, steadily progressing to more complex subjects. Very little differentiates you from your peer group apart from may be your hairstyle. Then you finish school and make a choice, this choice directs you for the next 4 to 6 years of your life. And, then you find a job. This day changes everything. The place where you live, the way you dress, the food you eat, the friends you have, the life style you sport and if you have not been very lucky as a student then maybe even the person you marry, will all depend on what you do.
And that is just the beginning; your career would continue to remain central for the rest of your life, unless in the vedic tradition you decide to get into a sanyasa ashram followed by a vanaprastha ashram. But even then, though you would have disassociated yourself with your career but other lesser human beings would still talk about you in context of what you achieved in your career. Your career would remain relevant even after you die. If you look at history, you will find no examples of people without any relevance to their career.
So that is what a career is. It is your identity for the rest of your life.
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Devote time
Given average life spans, you have lived less than 20% of your life. And the choice you make now will determine the remaining more than 80% of you life. This is the most important decision of your life and you should spend significant amount thinking about it.
Do your research
Any research has three phases. These are assimilating information, analysing what you have assimilated and deriving conclusions from what you have analysed. These phases may happen one after another or all at the same time. You never know, however one thing is sure that your research needs to have all the three phases.
Assimilate
Let us start with the first phase. Assimilating information. You need to find what career options exist. This exercise is hardly as simple as it seems. It is not limited to just finding out what courses are offered by various academic institutions or just what major streams of work are open to you as a science or arts or a commerce student. It is much more than that. When you are researching an option, which you might decide to make your career: you really need to know everything about it. So for example, if you want to find out whether you want to become a chartered accountant, you need to know. What does a chartered accountant really do? What are the challenges the job has to offer? What is the life of a chartered accountant? Does a chartered accountant need to travel a lot? Does a chartered accountant make a lot of money while he or she is still young or is it that it’s always their kids who enjoy the fruits of their hard work? How much can a chartered accountant influence his workplace or the country? And yes most importantly why does the planet earth need chartered accountants in the first place? The list can go on and on. You need to know everything. And since chartered accountancy is just one of the many things you could do, you really need to know everything about every career.
Analyse
Now let us look into the second phase. Analysing what you have assimilated. There is really not much to say about this phase. Since career is so important to all of us. While you are assimilating information about a particular career option, you would knowingly or unknowingly, be constantly analysing if that is what you really want to do. You would be visualising yourself as the professional and seeing if you like being that. And as you assimilate more information your analysis gets better. However, I would like to warn you of a very common mistake, which you may make here. Let us get back to the chartered accountant example. Apart from all what we discussed before, you would also like to know how one becomes a chartered accountant and whether you would be able to go through the struggle of becoming a chartered accountant. But at this stage, that is not important at all. When you are 60 and you look back at your life, what do you think would be relevant to you? 5 or six years after school which you spent struggling to become a chartered accountant. Or the 30 years of your life which you spent working as a chartered accountant? It is the 30 years of your career which would be important. Moreover, when you are 60 you wont be able to become a computer professional instead of a chartered accountant. But, that is something you can do now. So while you are assimilating information and analysing it you want to know everything about a career, without getting yourself bogged down by the struggle phase.
Conclude
Now the third phase. Deriving conclusions from what you have analysed. Once you get started into the mode of assimilating information and analysing it. You can keep doing it forever. So when do you stop? It is tough to say, there is so much to any career that you could virtually spend the rest of your life researching and analysing just one career option. But each one of us has limited time at our disposal. We need to take a decision of what we would be doing after school. Therefore it is important that we start our research right now and right here, constantly assimilating more information and analysing it. And at some point of time you would feel that you have decided what you want to do. But the important question is how you know if your conclusion is correct. If you decide to become a chartered accountant, you should be able to convince anyone else and more importantly yourself. That why you would rather be a chartered accountant and not a computer professional or an army officer or a fashion designer or a marketing manger or a personnel manager or an investment banker or a consultant or an economist or an architect or any other professional. You should be able to tell that why of all the things you could do in life you decided to devote it to chartered accountancy. And you want to do this because when you are 60 and looking back you do not want to repent on the decision you would be taking now.
In summary
So how do you choose a career? First you realise the importance of your decision, then you decide to devote time to the process and then you research. You start assimilating information, trying to know everything about every career. You constantly analyse what you have assimilated by visualising yourself as the professional and not bothering yourself with the struggle phase. And once you have decided what you want to do you are able to convince anyone that your decision is sound. Next you may want to read the following articles:
