Selecting a vocation

Congratulations Form Vs, you have passed all the school hurdles! Now the dream you are weaving is beginning to shape up. The tentative fantasy period is over. I hope you are now at the realistic stage where you have started narrowing your career options. At this stage, you are faced with a major life decision; the choice of a suitable work role.

Vocational development is a lifelong process, Form Vs. This is a crucial period for defining your occupational goals and launching a career. At this stage you need support from your family, school, community and mentoring companies.

As a career counsellor, today I am duty-bound to discuss the development of career or vocational choice and factors that influence vocational choice.

In this world, where there are so many careers, we need to start at an early stage to identify our vocation.

The fantasy period: This is the stage where children explore career options through play, for example they play nurses, teachers, doctors, etc. This stage is also a good rationale for taking your child to a play school.

The tentative period: At this period, teenagers weigh different career options against their interests, abilities and values. This is the stage where your guidance teacher is supposed to expose you to certain psychometric tests. I wish to highlight and emphasise that you cannot separate testing from counselling. The appraisal informs the counselling. Do not take lightly the Self-Directed Search (SDS) test, aptitude test, career walk and so on. I want to believe that those in Form V got their aptitude test certificates and the results were interpreted. If not, take your certificate and ask any career counsellor to interpret it for you.

The realistic period: At this stage you have to settle on a vocational category and then a specific occupation. This is when you say, for example, ‘I want Social Sciences’ without selecting specific majors. Then, later on, say ‘I want to major in Biology or Chemistry’. Later still you can decide whether you want to go into teaching, medicine or become a laboratory technician.

Vocational choice is influenced by personality, educational background, families, vocational information, gender stereotypes, interests and more. Today we shall discuss personality and ‘family background personality’. According to John Holland (1985), people are attracted to occupations that complement their personalities. Holland identified six personality types that affected vocational choice:

l The investigative person, who enjoys working
with ideas, is likely to select a scientific occupation (e.g. an engineer or physicist).

l The social person, one who likes interacting with people, gravitates towards human services (counselling, social work, teaching).

l The realistic person who prefers real world problems and working with objects tends to choose a mechanical occupation (construction, plumbing or surveying).

l The artistic person who is emotional and highly in need of individual expression, looks towards an artistic field (writing, music, the theatre, and so on).

l The conventional person, who likes well- structured tasks and values material possessions and social status, has traits well-suited to certain business fields (accounting, banking, quality control).

l The enterprising person, who is adventurous, persuasive, and a strong leader, is drawn to sales and supervisory positions or to politics.

Please note that many people are blends of several personality types and can do well at more than one kind of occupation. However, be careful to choose the most dominant personality type for a career.

In conclusion, I wish to say all young people have the opportunity to change their minds at all the stages of vocational development. A few know from an early age just what they want to be and follow a direct path to a career goal. Some decide and later change their minds. That is why we witness students exploring various options before settling for one. Of course, this has repercussions in regard to finances, scholarships and more.

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