Helping your ward or child choose a career path is a very difficult one. The task of career choice is ten times herculean for the child. Growing up, every Ghanaian child wanted to be a doctor, lawyer, engineer and so forth. In our present times, parents have a huge contribution to making sure the child’s future profession is planned and secured.
Career Definitions
The Cambridge Dictionary defines a career as the job or series of jobs that you do during your working life, especially if you continue to get better jobs and earn more money.
According to Google, career is an occupation undertaken for a significant period of a person’s life with opportunities for Progress.
Wikipedia defines a career as an individual’s journey through learning, work and other aspects of life. A career can be seen as a profession, occupation, vocation, a calling or employment.
Career Preparedness
Our work as parents, teachers etc. is a calling, charging us to assist wards to make the best decisions. It is therefore important that each one of us tries to identify the potentials in our children and develop them. Every individual has some talents.
The following key points would guide us in identifying the potentials in our children and pupils.
Superpower(s):
- Ask your ward to list strengths, weaknesses, and personality traits.
- Find out what your child is good at by observing him or her.
- When you do this in consultation with your ward, you likely help him or her make the best choice.
Some children may have one or more out of the below as their superpower
- Talking
- Writing
- Science
- Maths
- Using computers
- Painting or music
- Practical tasks, like making models or repairing things
Interest
- Find out what interests your child and match it with his or her personality traits.
- Do not overlook the interest of your child or impose your preference. He or she might not be happy choosing what you wanted him or her to become.
Career Motivation
- Does your child want job satisfaction in the kind of profession he or she is choosing?
- Once you know what drives your ward profession wise, you are likely to make a good choice.
The Bigger Picture
Find out about the occupations that are in direct correlation with the abilities and interests of your child in order to make the best choice.
Seek advise
- Talk to counsellors, your peers, family and leaders; they may have some ideas about the vocation that suits your ward which you may not have thought of.
Backup Plan
- With the ideal employment in mind, it’s always good to have other choices for the job path.
- Guide your ward to think about alternative profession choices and have a second or third option ready in case their plans need to change. This could be a different job choice. It could perhaps be a different route towards their first choice career or a similar one.
Conclusion
- It is wrong to force our children into careers they do not have what it takes to do.
- It is also wrong to force your children to achieve career goals you couldn’t attain.
We must help them to make better choices in order to make good use of our human resource as a country. Thank you.
Career Story By Joshua Mantey Tetteh (Owula sorkorboi Behoko on Facebook)
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