The professional vocation acts as a driving element when choosing an area of work performance and a type of work: if the chosen job does not coincide with your own vocation, you will run the risk of being permanently unmotivated throughout your career. We will analyze the importance of knowing your vocation, and we will give you some clues to help you guide it.
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What is the professional vocation?
Professional vocation could be defined as the impulse (innate or acquired) that leads people to express a strong desire to work in a specific job.
Children are often asked a seemingly harmless question: what do you want to be when you grow up? Many children respond conditioned to what they see on a daily basis or based on their childhood illusions: soccer player or singer (from what they see on television), police or firefighter (from what they see on the street), veterinarian (if your parents have a pet), doctor (if they like the pediatrician they take you to).
Go ahead that the professions mentioned can be really vocational: in reality, any profession is likely to be vocational. However, what happens when we ask ourselves this question again as adults, and we still can’t find an answer?
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How does a professional vocation arise?
Professional vocation can appear during childhood, adolescence, youth or adulthood: there are people who express it from a very young age, and others do not find it until well into maturity. In any case, it is just as valid.
It can be practically impossible to determine why a person, during their younger years, has a clear tendency toward a specific professional area: the concerns could arise from a hobby practiced in the family, or from a subject that they are particularly good at at school.
The choice can also take place after certain years, normally during academic development, and even once incorporated into the labor market: it is not necessary to limit the field of professional vocation to childhood or adolescence.
How to find your professional vocation?
Know yourself
People have a series of innate abilities and skills, as well as certain limitations when it comes to structuring thoughts or undertaking tasks; apart, there is the work we do during our academic development, during which we could find out our strengths and weaknesses.
Although there are jobs that require academic qualifications (degrees, university or master’s degrees) and others do not, the truth is that they all require a series of aptitudes (personal and professional skills) to be carried out.
To find your professional calling, you must first find out what skills you have, as well as what you lack: it will not be a good idea to choose a profession that does not match your abilities or your limitations.
In other words: discover what you are really good at doing, and don’t be afraid to discover your limitations. Remember the words of Alejandro Jodorowsky: “we are all worth something, but we are not all worth the same“.
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Analyze the economic return of the chosen profession
Seriously consider whether the chosen profession will give you enough economic income to become your livelihood: your great passion may not offer you enough financial support.
Leaving aside the psychological and academic part, you will have to analyze at some point the ability to monetize your professional vocation. Sometimes, it is convenient to relegate a professional vocation that you cannot live from to the level of hobbies, and look for another alternative to obtain a livelihood.
With this we do not mean that you only choose well-paid jobs because it will be useless to carry out your professional career in a sector that does not fill you just because you earn a lot of money with it: there are things that money cannot pay for, and you could end up feeling huge frustration.
explore your concerns
There is a strong component of personal fulfillment in the professional vocation: normally, vocations are linked to a series of personal concerns that find an answer in the performance of a specific discipline.
It is about looking inside yourself and finding out your concerns, that is, determining if there is any answer that your personal background longs to find, and if you can find it by carrying out one or another professional branch.
To do this, visualize yourself exercising one or another profession: try to recreate a scenario in which you put all the above parameters on the table. If doubts continue to assail you, probably the chosen profession is not vocational.
The professional vocation can appear very early, and it could also never be found: it is very important to find it as soon as possible because taking a turn in the professional career, when a certain path has been traveled, is more difficult and risky than when we are still giving our first academic and labor steps.