What Career? Which Job?

Are you a career person? Most probably, in the affirmative.

So what career, and which job?

By the way, what is a career?
A career is something that you want to spend the major part of your life doing. What it is depends on what you want, your likes and dislikes, whether you prefer staying indoors or under the sun. It depends on whether you like using your head or your hands. Do you like working in a group or individually? There are thousands of possibilities.

Which Job?
Some people want to have a career but do not like working. Some want to work but they cannot get a decent job. They may not have the necessary qualification, skills and / or competence. They may not be physically fit for the job. Suitable jobs may not be available or if available, they are too far away.

In order to secure a job, you need to have some skills in doing something useful. Skills range from the brainy types to the physically challenging. These skills and competence must be the ones employers are looking for. Having the right qualification, skills, competence and personality is essential in order to get employed.

Man must work
Every capable person needs to have something to do. Even those physically-challenged can earn a living as long as their brain cells can function. It follows that national / state government must create jobs for its citizens. Or they bring about enabling infrastructure whereby jobs can be created by private organization. People cannot be forced to beg for their food.

On the other hand, no one must refuse to work and earn their living. Laziness is not something to be encouraged. You can't entertain such mentality. It is written somewhere that anyone who does not work must not eat.

Choose to work
So at the end of the day, you need to look for a job to earn your living, to give meaning to your existence as a human being. But you must be the one who define the job.

What you need to do is to carry out an inventory of what you know, your skills and competence. After doing this, look for a job that fits the description. If you don't try, you may never know.  You may strike it big, making it to a senior position or making a fortune doing something that helps other people live their lives to fulfillment.

Problem Solving Skills

You will need problem solving skills whatever your station in life is and whether you are employed or self-employed or unemployed. In fact, life can be full of problems if you want to look for problems.

Problem solving skills are clearly useful if you have a job. It does not matter what kind of job you may have and whatever position that you hold. From janitors to clerks to executives, they all need skills in solving problems in connection with their respective jobs.

Disasters abound in organizations if every junior employees have to refer every problem higher up. If problems remain unsolved at lower level, top management will be inundated with problems awaiting decision. Things will come to a standstill. Service suffers. Customers leave. The organization may collapse and close down. And everybody suffers including employers, employees, and other stakeholders.

Problem solving skills can be learned. Attendance at suitable training programs help you learn these important skills.

If organizations send their people to attend the right training courses they will benefit in the long run. Ongoing training is necessary to equip people with the necessary skills or to update skills and knowledge.

Delegate duties and responsibilities

Where the conditions merit, superiors can delegate some of their less important duties and responsibilities to subordinates from time to time. This is a form of training in decision making.

Coach employees
Coaching employees help them learn faster how to make good decisions. Some call this mentoring. (These two are not exactly the same in terms of time span, and so on.)

Through effective coaching of subordinates, you can rest assured that if you are not around the office, things are fine.

Career progression
Many organizations look for excellent problem solving skills as one of the requirements in those they are thinking of promoting. This is especially true of supervisory positions at whatever level in the hierarchy.

Some decisions have to be made almost instantaneously. Some problems have to be thought through for a while before a decision is made.

Equip yourself with effective problem solving skills. These are useful whatever you do.

Get a qualification that you want and will get you employed

There are thousands of graduates idling away their time. They can't find any employment. Many of them may have qualification that thousands also have. The job market for which they have the relevant qualification is saturated.

It is no surprise that so many of these graduates are forced to take up jobs that require a different type of qualification. There is qualification-job mismatch. This is a waste of talent.

This is exactly why you need get a qualification that you like but also will get you employed. But even so, you may not get employed in the industry that you prefer.

I knew of one case where a graduate is qualified for a specific job but took up a very different type of employment. There can be many reasons why a person does something that other people may find hard to understand. At the end of the day, what is more important is that the person is happy doing the job.

Having paper qualification is not enough in certain cases. The person needs to have special or specialized skills such as in the case of a mechanic, a painter or a sculptor.

A job that have something to do with people could well be among the most challenging jobs. It is believed that a person who manages people must have the brains but must have the empathy. If so, that person can do very well in managing people.

Having empathy can help you move up and when you do you can easily deal with human-related problems.