CAREER AS A LIFE-LONG PROGRESS, EVEN SINCE WE WERE SMALL!

In my opinion, Career is a life-long progress. The beginning of career development is since we were small. As this stage, since a small child does not know their self-concept and their state of self-efficacy, hence they might say any kin of profession they are interested in as their ambition. My assumption is, this circumstance happens when they are becoming attracted and conditioned with a particular profession based on pleasure principle or through the interest that they develop through modeling.

Firstly, I say it is based on pleasure principle because it is nature as a child, they do not know their capacity and aptitude to meet the requirements that particular profession. Furthermore, they are still naïve about the nature and qualification of the profession. Therefore, from time to time, when they are growing up, their interest towards the profession might change, not even once, not even twice, but sometimes they might change their interest and career path several times in their life. This thing occur due to they somehow realize they are not comfortable with world of the profession after analyzing and considering their qualifications in term of interest, educational level, aptitudes, and attitudes and so on. With right guidance, this kind of people might make right decision in undergoing their career path. In contrary, if wrong guidance or there is no guideline at all, these people might suffer a job-hopping habit. It is hard to see these people enjoy and success in their life if job-hopping still becomes a practice to them as a proverb tells us, “Rolling Stone Gathered No Moss”. Since at first they changed interest and ambition due to no concrete reason, as well as “just for fun” or “try and error” attitude become their force during childhood, someone should help and guide them to be matured in analyzing and understanding their self-concept, self-efficacy and also understanding how to respond to the current situation of world of work.

However, there are also some child insist with their ambition and try to develop their attitude, aptitude, and educational qualifications in order to ensure they are still on the right track. In my point of view, this thing by reason of getting right guideline by environment and also through they themselves who have iron will at the bottom of their hearts.

Secondly, my assumption about how children develop starts become interested in certain profession is due to modeling. For instance, sometimes a child might say he/she wants to be a doctor due to his father or mother or any family member is a doctor too. It might happen through that child admires to see the style of his family member based on several reasons, such as that family member’s looks smart in the profession’s dress code, or his/her positive attitude like caring, loving, and brave, or that family already establish that profession as their traditional profession. Therefore, in this case, sometimes we can see a stereotype profession in a family. The best example I can give is our former Prime Ministers, Tun Hussein Onn, Tun Mahathir, and Tun Razak, all of them have their sons in Malaysian political field today. Same thing happens to our DAP Member of Parliament (MP), Karpal Singh, who is a lawyer and MP, and his son, Gobind Singh also exactly follows his footstep. Hence, in my own conclusion is the early stage of our career path is basically based on pleasure principle and through modeling.