Success and profession: A shining pathway in life
Success! A word of 7 letters with a huge impact…
When you make plans and things go as planned, you call it success.
You see success, when you set for yourself a timeframe to finish a task and you follow it.
You feel you succeed when you set goals for yourself and you aim to achieve them.

Image by Laura Alzmeter
Success is often related to achieving a task you wanted to fulfil, and very often, we tend to relate it to employment. Success at work seems going from position to another and from grade to another: “I started as an intern, 2 years later I became senior, and here I am now a manager!”
Sometimes it feels easy to succeed in one’s work environment, whereas at other times it looks hard. Some people choose to pursue success at work, while other people purposefully choose an occupation where they believe they will succeed.
But how this choice is made? How these people were able to identify occupations where they find success?
Recently, I had some conversations with friends, colleagues, co-workers about their choice of profession and occupation; many of them identified such a profession but they are currently working in another field.
This conflict of choice arises for many reasons:
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Sometimes we feel lost, we have no clue what to choose as a career, and seeing the labour market needs, we end up with the first choice we have in front of us. At other times, we get influenced by the prestige and the appearance of a profession, so we choose the most prestigious field. Rarely do we get influenced by a certain person who pushes us to follow his or her pathway, while often we choose a career based on our capacities or pre-requisite knowledge. It is obvious that a person with a humanities background at high school will choose literature, journalism, law… as a profession, and another person with a biology background in school would rather go for medicine. Going through occupation choice, often we see ourselves jumping from a field to another different field because we are looking for more money. Sometimes, we are just interested in the job/company, or we expect to get more benefits working for our target company and not in another one. Personally, I chose a career in education because my parents wanted me to. “Being a school teacher is the best option for a girl. You can go to school with your kids, come back together, you have holidays to spend together and summer is a break for the whole family!” It sounds good at first, but if you dig deeper, it is not easy to deal with 8 year-old kids and teach them the basics of language. Often, we hear funny statements like these from other people in the middle of a random communication, or a presentation at college. At such a moment, you realise that maybe you took a wrong decision of choosing a different profession while you are succeeding in another. Personally, I would never forget what a professor told me when I was in the second year of my bachelor’s degree in Early Childhood Education: “What are you doing here? You shouldn’t be studying education, you should have applied to journalism, you nailed the presentation with this reportage you made!” At that moment, you might feel happy but sad, too. You might question why you are in this field while you seem to be more successful with journalism skills. It prompt renewed self-reflection on what were the things you like, where you find yourself, what you know you could do and be good at. Personally, I found myself wishing I had the opportunity for a real orientation and exploration of different fields before identifying and choosing education definitively. Today, I wish to emphasise the importance of identifying and choosing what you would like to do in your career. Find your interest, taking into consideration what you know, what you are good at and what you love. Reflect on your choices, research the field and try to explore it. Surf some orientation websites with assessments via measurable indicators where you can discover and explore fields you can fit in based on your personality, knowledge, skills… And then identify the occupation you feel you will succeed in… And don’t forget to follow our GiLE news for the GiLE4Youth conference to learn more on career planning. To be continued…How did I face this inner dilemma?
“What the hell are you doing here? You are way better doing what you just did! You shouldn’t be here in the first place.”
My advice to you when you are looking for a job:
Author:
Laura Alzmeter
Article Writer & Content Contributor
- April 11, 2022

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The opinions expressed in this article/publication are those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the opinions or views of GiLE or its members.
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