subject: Article 1 - What Is The Best Career For Me? [print this page] Copyright (c) 2010 IansonHere is the first in a number of articles that consider the link between child development, career choice and the impact on the macro economy. This first article considers the impact of early years education on the career choices individuals make.What's the best job for me? Perhaps this is actually the question you need to have been asking when you were about 8 years old, or should your parents and teachers been trying to encourage your efforts at school towards your future employment. It appears often the link between education and employment is forged far too late in our development, would a short time digging a hole or stacking shelves in a supermarket, or even worse several days of enforced daytime television a couple of times a year from about age 10 help kids understand that the effort you put in now may well dictate what you spend virtually all your adult life doing to earn your living. Perhaps this is too radical a notion, but something about the way we handle developing young people is seriously wrong, we leave far too much to chance.If we start from the beginning by looking at the stimulus we are given as preschool children by our parents we can often see a bias based upon the interests of the parents in what we are given to play with or be entertained by. The child that is given a ball to play with in the garden and the parents spend time having a kick about or playing catch will encourage a healthy child that due to association with pleasure will respond well to sport, but will that child become an architect or a musician? In a perfect world each parent would be provided an instruction manual and set of equipment to make certain every child is positively exposed to every stimulus possible to encourage interest in all types of activity, this would enable the child to identify their own interests as they became older and they would most likely lean towards what they are best at.This highly progressive approach could be further extended in school with a more flexible curriculum and earlier attempts to identify potential career paths and encourage relevant learning that would support the development of knowledge, skills and qualifications of interest to the child at an earlier age. If this proposal seems a little crazy, try asking school leavers and those entering university what career path they would like to follow and what it involves, unfortunately you will find many of them have no idea of what sort of job or career path they wish to follow, or what is really involved in doing any particular job on a day by day basis.Perhaps the stance you should be taking belongs to building individuals with a rounded education and a good selection of transferable skills that would let them move from one occupation to another, thus giving us a highly flexible workforce, perhaps it could be argued that is really where we are now. This idea is all very well, but can an advertising executive jump to a new career as a doctor, yes but with some difficulty, and if you call 7 years of education a jump. The real problem is the assessment of intelligence and ability and an early age is just too haphazard, teachers have a vague appreciation of different children's intelligence and abilities, but anyone that has gone through teacher training which is honest will admit they are hardly experts on intelligence and the potential of children. In fact many individuals will show you of a teacher that inspired them and gave them self belief, unfortunately many more will explain of teachers that put them down, lowered their self esteem and set them on a path of low achievement and low expectation, thanks Miss!
