External influences on career decision Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3750 words

External influences on career decision - Essay Example A few years down the line, the child starts asking the same question, â€Å"When I grow up what will I be?† like the words of the famed song â€Å"Que Sera Sera.† Today a child sees a toy engine and wants to be an engine driver, tomorrow he sees the smart firemen on their shiny fire engines and he wants to be a firefighter, the next day he sees Superman on TV and wants to be him. Even when the child visits a doctor he immediately wants to be him. Every day he wants to be something new, something wonderful, something adventurous. Gradually, as he grows into a teenager, he wants to do something great like to become an astronaut flying into space, a scientist making the most important inventions, and so on. Then the time comes when he has to actually make the decision. What is he going to do? It is a very difficult question. Very few have an answer ready, though one has mulled over it a million times in the past. Let us consider these lucky ones or smart ones who have alre ady decided what they are going to do with their lives. Who are they? We can call them the lucky ones because they have recognized their innate ability, their talent. These are the ones who have been born with some extraordinary skill and have been able to identify this talent or skill either on their own or with the help of others. It could be a great voice, ear for music, a talent for dancing, sporting, mimicry, acting, painting, or sculpting. They are the geniuses. They know what they want to do with their life and that becomes their career choice, or more accurately their passion in life. This is more of an internal influence on career choice. There is no confusion. He simply aims to reach the pinnacle of excellence in that field. These are the extremely talented people who are lucky to have identified their talents. Hence, we can say that they fall into the category of the chosen few. The next category of people being those who are less talented but extremely interested in spec ific fields – these fields mostly include the arts like music, painting, etc., or any specific sporting activity. These people are passionate about their interests and don’t mind working really hard to groom themselves to acquire success in their field of interest. This again is an internal influence. So, an internal influence can be defined as â€Å"originating within the individual† and the main motivation here is individual satisfaction† (Duffy and Dik, 2009). External influences are those â€Å"which originate outside the individual† and the main motive is to satisfy this â€Å"external factor or criteria.† There are too many external influences on an individual’s career choice. It is not possible to list all of them. But in this research we will make an attempt to study the major ones. First of all the external influences are of two kinds – those that motivate and those that restrict. Motivating factors could be the people around you, your needs, and your inspirations. Constraints could be your belonging to a certain race or gender, living in a certain geographic location, the resources at your disposal (financial or otherwise). But, as we can see, though most of them are not within ones personal control, all these factors do play a major role in the choice of career. Family Most studies show that the family and the immediate social environment play a major role