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Isaiah Brazile
Albert Loaiza
Counseling 150
16 February 2023
Components To Success
According to the Washington Post, only about twenty seven percent of students in college
acquire a job directly from the major they earned a degree in. However, in 2010 only sixty two
percent of college graduates began job that even required a degree. For someone who is unsure
what they even want to do in life, those statistics can be very intimidating. My journey to
choosing a career has been very rigorous, considering I had no plan for what I wanted to do. The
journey of figuring out what is best for me was not a matter of what route to take in order to get
there but, what are my likes, dislikes, values, goals and skillsets that could help me move
towards the path I want in life. After all, I am the only one living in my own shoes so no one else
can live this life for me. And hopefully, deciding what is best for me can lead me towards a
career and enhance the skillsets I want to acquire and accomplish the goal I desire to achieve.
Understanding personal preferences, likes and dislikes, is essential to interpreting one’s
career path. According to CBS News, around fifty one percent of the U.S.’s full time workers do
the minimum requirements at their job because they are unhappy with where they work. These
statistics leave room for workers in the workforce who work really hard at their jobs, or anything
above the minimum requirement, but still are unsatisfied with their jobs. So, more than half of
America’s full-time work force is dissatisfied. On a personal level, that is not a life I want to live
because around eighty percent of our lives are spent working and how am I supposed to be
satisfied doing something that is not appealing to me? In other words, what is the point of
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choosing a career if it does not bring me happiness. For a person to pursue something they do not
necessarily like can be a recipe for disaster and that is why I have no desire to put myself in a
field that I do not have a like for. So, I made a list of things of things I either took a liking to or
had a desire for. Some of those likes were: mathematics, interacting with people, site seeing,
listening to music and riding motorcycles. But, how in the world is someone supposed to base a
career choice off a merely something they just like? Luckily for me, in my counseling course, at
my community college, we were asked to take a career assessment to better guide us as we
decided what direction we want to go with our lives. The assessment was through a company
called Kuder. The assessment asked in depth questions related to personal interest as well as
values.
Values are just as important as preferences, such as the list of them I gave earlier, because
