Monday, April 12, 2010

Enabling career directions

A cousin of mine did his Bachelors in music, his MBA in Finance and is now a Systems Engineer. I was once interviewed for a position in a tech company by the company's President - he had done his Bachelors in liberal arts and then studied law before moving on to working in a tech company! Look up Allen Blue, VP of Product Strategy and Co-founder at LinkedIn. He did his BA in drama, and then started his career as a theatrical scenery and lightning designer. In all the examples above, what I want you to notice is the drastic change in career paths.

The question: How come and why then, did I and all of my friends choose to stick to what fields we picked when we were 17?

At 17, I knew to speak English well, I knew some basics laws of Physics, I knew some math theorems, I knew about a few wars that were fought by the various kings in various parts of the world, I knew to write a program to generate Fibonacci series in Cobal and Fortran - and that qualifies me to decide what I would be doing for the rest of my life!!?!

What is my point? - Am I saying one should not be allowed to decide one's career path at 17? No. I am saying (1) one should be equipped better to choose one's career path at 17 and (2) should have the freedom and avenues to change it if he/she wants to and has the capability and passion for it.

How to achieve these is a separate debate, but the point is that this problem exists - the issue that there are numerous software engineers out there today, who never got the opportunity to explore if they would make better/happier psychologists or wildlife researchers than software engineers.

3 comments:

LifeIsAGame said...

well.. the problem is fear of failure and fear of unknown. You are only seeing scenarios of success. What about folks who regret changing career?. Also, whenever you change careers there is setback initially... are people in situation to face it ?. There are so many constraints.. finances/family/how society will perceive etc.

Anonymous said...

[HS] The fear is inculcated by the society.

And of course people shouldn't change careers if they aren't in a position to do it financially or whatever other reason - that is a valid reason to not change. That I understand. My point is that society and the educational system hasn't placed enough focus on pursuing passion as opposed to pursuing a "career".

LifeIsAGame said...

today, things have changed. lot of people do it. In aLl the cases u listed above, destination seems to have been 'I T'. Its not easy to succeed in a path you have not been trained for.. one needs to figure out their destiny early enough.. otherwise they have a huge mental block to fight out with.

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