Career Choice

There’s no doubt about it, career choice is one of the most fundamental decisions that people are faced with.  Make a good choice, and you significantly increase your chances that life will be fulfilling and enjoyable. The wrong choice, however, leads to frustration and disappointment. It stands to reason then, that many who feel frustrated with their lives, unfulfilled or despondent in some way – may have simply made the wrong career choice.

Many will make the choice once, and only once, when they are young, and then follow the path that is laid out for them.  Others have more fleeting relationships with their decisions and are constantly looking for the right path, and maybe going around in circles at the same time.  Neither of these extremes is guaranteed to produce the right outcome.  Let’s look at the problems.

Early Choosers

Chances are, you either had a flair for some course or other, and so were encouraged to develop that ‘talent’, and then followed the advice of your Career Service to pursue a path which uses that talent.  Or you didn’t have a flair, or weren’t of the academic persuasion and ended up doing whatever you could get when you left school.  The critical point here is that, either way, you have little experience of actual work when you make the choice.  Career Service seems to favour the path that leads to greatest riches based on your talent.  Likewise, if you leave school early, you’re likely to take the highest paying opportunity available to you.  At this stage in your life, the ideas of fulfilment, making a personal difference and creating change for good are treated as second class citizens, bystanders to the more import ideal of ‘earning as much as you can with what you’ve got’

Will of the Wisps

You see things in a greater context perhaps, realising that there must be something more to life.  You’ve decided that the first job you took wasn’t the one for you, so you changed.  Bravo!  But then the second job didn’t really stack up well for you either, so you changed again… and again… and again…

The likely problem is twofold – poor decision making, and little investment in your choices.  The two go hand in hand in fact, since if you make considered choices, understanding the pros and cons and trading them off against each other based on your personal choice of priorities, then you will recognise the cons, and see them balanced against the pros.  On the other hand, if you chose a path to avoid the cons you discovered in your current job, then likely the cons that you discover there will encourage you to change again.

Making the Right Choice

Pursuit of happiness is the real goal here, and people need to recognise that.  In the science of Economics, Happiness is represented by money – since it allows you to buy things or services that make you happier – it’s all about trade-offs, give and take.  Sounds ideal – so chase the money right?  Well – in an ideal Economy perhaps, but we are reminded daily that Economics is only a model – a model of a perfect system, and a system in which there is nobody living – certainly not us!

So, what’s the answer?  Recognise your ability to choose your priorities in life.  It’s a personal choice, so make it yourself – don’t accept the ‘defaults’ that society imposes on us.  Once you’ve made your choices, evaluate your options against those priorities.  Accept that you will have to make trade-off decisions.  When you encounter the negatives that you traded-off already – recognise the positives in your life that you traded them for!

Finally, regularly evaluate your priorities – they may change without you realising.