by David Biggs
For many young people, their school career is over and they are now preparing for the next important step along life’s bumpy road. Many important career choices will be made during the coming months.
Experience shows a few of them will become reality. I was chatting to a group of friends recently, three of whom were teachers, (all of them parents)and we discussed – among other things – how life leads us along sometimes strange pathways. Hardly anyone we knew had actually followed the career path they’d chosen when leaving school.
One friend who had launched into the highly technical field of nuclear medicine switched careers in mid-life and became a luthier, making beautiful cellos which have enchanted audiences around the world. One set out to be an engineer and ended up running a fitness academy. One young friend gave me her business card, which gave her profession as “polysomnographer.” Her job is to track the sleep patterns of people with sleeping problems.
I bet she didn’t leave school saying: “I’m off to spend my working life watching people sleep.” The good news for school leavers is that the world of work is an incredibly diverse place, full of people doing interesting jobs most of us have never even heard of. Experts design security systems, install solar water heaters, repair TV sets, teach people to drive cars or cook pizzas, make garden gnomes and create mosaic floors.
My own very chequered career started off as a milk recorder, travelling from dairy farm to dairy farm measuring the butter-fat content of each cow’s milk. Nobody told me that was a possible career when I left school.
About the only school leavers who stick doggedly to one lifelong career seem to be doctors and engineers. For the rest, the world’s an Aladdin’s cave of possibilities.
The good news for school leavers, then, is that you don’t have to make a firm career choice now. You will be asked by adults, “What are you going to do?” Tell them you’re going to explore. Never stop learning. No knowledge or skill is ever wasted. You have a whole exciting life ahead of you. Live it to the full.
Last Laugh
A man sat down at a restaurant table and ordered a plate of grilled fish. He waited and waited and eventually called the manager and asked when his meal was coming. “Ready in a moment, sir,” said the manager. But again the man waited. Eventually he called the manager again and said: “If you don’t mind my asking, sir, what bait are you using?”
* "Tavern of the Seas" is a daily column written in the Cape Argus by David Biggs. Biggs can be contacted at [email protected]
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
Cape Argus