Choosing a profession

Cambridge Dictionary’s definition of profession: any type of work that needs special training or a particular skill, often one that is respected because it involves a high level of education.
 

Vincent van Gogh, on the other hand, said that “Your profession is not what brings home your weekly paycheck, your profession is what you're put here on earth to do, with such passion and such intensity that it becomes spiritual in calling.”
 

A similar word, expressing quite the same meaning; it is vocation: a type of work that you feel you are suited to doing and to which you should give all your time and energy, or the feeling that a type of work suits you in this way.
 

What’s a wisdom! So how do young people choose their profession? For love, for passion or for wealth and fame? A balance mixture should be the optimal.
 

Why? Because we all need financial support to live a decent life. Recent survey in UK shows that many parents encourages their offspring to follow traditional careers for economic reasons even though the majority of students want to enter creative industries.
 

Besides, there are a wide range of factors that affect a career choice. Among them is gender. Girls seem to choose profession that demands less physical effort as shows in survey result by OECD. Girls avoid engineer, mechanics, ICT occupations, while they want to be doctor, teacher, psychologist and lawyer.
 

(15 most cited occupations by gender)

Another important factor is market potential. Who want a profession that does not bring comfortable life? Therefore, youngsters should be aware of the market relevance of their career – in the future.
 

One crucial factor demands all profession to be successful is ability. We must be able and be trained to build up ability to do well what we want to do. It demands diligence, patience, perseverance, discipline and hard work for many years. Not exactly 10000 hours, maybe more maybe less, but long time is certainly a prerequisite.