A survey for high school students about career planning... PAGEV, Turkey

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/?sm=asi%2Fnjl9StNp0%2FF2tkXiVQ%3D%3D

 

Find your path IES L'OM, Spain

On  the 5th November, a woman from California who’s working as a Spanish-English translator and interpreter in our country, gave us a talk about choosing our right  professional career. She advised on making the right career  choices depending on our goals. So we learnt about the importance of looking  into our future by setting and resetting  goals regularly. According to her, the  skills needed for all kinds of jobs are the following:

→ Problem - Solving Skills

→ A willingness to learn

→ Respectful attitude towards other ones

→ Dedication and a solid work ethic

→ Dependability and punctuality

→ Positive attitude

→ Self-confidence

 

When  choosing our future occupation, our perfect match would be related to our values, interests, personality type, aptitude and feelings about the job duties.We are all supposed to have work preferences and styles, different salary expectations and motivations. Some people value more prestige than a high salary, but a common thing people value is autonomy, but  perhaps some other people may consider helping the others as their top priority when choosing a job. She also recommended us a website for kind of discovering our interests; www.mynextmove.org/explore/ip

 

My own interests seem to be quite varied. She also asked us to  reflect on  what  our ideal career would be like in 10 years time from now. We should also research on the labor market information and employment prospects.

 

She also informed us about the  fastest growing and most in-demand  occupations such as Translators or Interpreters, Information Security Analysts, Biomedical Engineers, Industrial-Organizational Psychologists, Genetic Counselors and Physician Assistants. On the other hand, she explained us some new professions of the 21st Century, such as Social Media Manager, Housing Rehabilitator Architect, just like the ones from the reality shows, Computer Architect, On-line Sales Expert, Application Developer, Conflict Resolution Mediator, Nutritionist, Environmentalist, Big Data Consultant and 3D Restoration and Archeologist Architect.

 

Her talk  was really  interesting, although it was  maybe too informative. But, although I agreed with her on some points, she wasn’t talking about real life. Most people spend  most of their lives in a job they don’t like or maybe  in  one they didn’t expect to. They can even end up in the street. Unfortunately, not everybody can end up working in a job they  love, earning a high salary and being autonomous with no need of  economical support.  Life isn’t a film, you aren’t always going to get what you want just by  working hard, and you won’t make a lot of  money if you’re a good person. And of course, our life will never be as we planned it when we were teens, and there’s something called competition for getting the job you want. We  sometimes need to be  a bit  selfish for your own  success.

 

So, in the end, I think this was a speech oriented to indecisive people who haven’t  decided what to study yet, and that’s good, perhaps they need some career guidance, but as it was  given by a person who seemed to have been  quite successful in life, I don’t think  it was realistic. Life isn’t as easy as saying “I’m good at Biology, I’ll be a Biomedical Engineer”. Personally, this is  quite unreal. Or you think, with all my respect to all kinds of jobs, as respectable as they are , that the life’s goal of all people working as  cleaners or risking their health or working   in a mine was to be there doing what normally nobody would want to do? We don’t have the same opportunities and the same talents. Life isn’t a fairytale and there are winners and losers.

 

Maria Luisa Muñoz 3ºP