How to Make a Wise Career Choice in Nigeria 2023

How to make career choice for students in Nigeria is one of the challenging personal decision which can not be avoided by anyone who truly desires success in life.

And a number of factors comes to play when making such decision as a Nigerian student faced with so many Nigerian economic, social and political debilitating factors.

How to Make Career Choice in Nigeria

In this section, we are going to look in more details all you need to know about how to make career choice in Nigeria. This guide will help you make a choice that will enable you achieve the success you desire and reach your goal in your career.

But before we go ahead, it is important to understand what career is all about. Are you ready? Let’s quickly get started immediately.

What is Career?

Career has to do with various fields of work and discipline which cut across technical, professional, vocational, artisan and their related products and services for the sake of solving any need of man in a given society.

In other words, your career is your work; Your career is your discipline; Your career is your vocation; Your career is your profession; Or your career is your product(s) or service(s) employable towards fixing/solving a given human need(s) in a given society.

Some careers are capable of solving global human needs; for example, production of cars as a career can solve the problem of human mobility anywhere around the world, and someone else can choose to develop services around such car production career by focusing in the marketing of cars or the car products, utilities and spare parts, Mechanical Engineering (i.e. car repairs, servicing and maintenance), Car Mechatronics Engineering, Car Scraps Recycling Services, etc.

WHAT YOU NEED TO MAKE GOOD CAREER CHOICE

In our discussion of How to Make Career Choice in Nigeria, To be able to fit in Successfully in any career sector, one needs to develop a viable action plan and engage in relevant, learning, training or skill acquisition processes.

All these take a lot of discipline, focus, time and other relevant  material resources, including capital/financial investment to be able to specialize and succeed in a particular career sector of your interest.

However, as human beings, we are always left with the problem of choice at any stage of human personality development. And among other practicable theories, the theory of choice have been creating a lot of questions which if well answered could reposition an individual towards the expected or desirable future success, thereby redefining the best career for that person in his lifetime.

A good career choice rightly made can lead to personality fulfillment.

FACTORS THAT CAN INFLUENCE CAREER CHOICE

As a young man or even a student, the choice of your career to a large extent can be influenced or distorted by your immediate or remote environmental factors or even lack of material resources, health/disabilities, lack of capital/finance resources and lack of enabling environment or leverages.

For example, when we think of making the right and viable choice of career in  Nigeria, it is entirely a different ball game when choosing a career by someone or a student in the United State of America or in China. You need to consider first your immediate environment and then the remote/global environmental factors in defining and choosing accurately the field of your career.

You need to put into perspective the scope of problem of interest found within a given society which your career of interest can easily be deployed in solving such human needs, and do your best also to make your scope simple and well focused.

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CAREER SUCCESS

Your career success to a large extent depends on energy, passion, vision, goal, objectives, consistency, focus, discipline, good management and scope (scope here means the needed coverage over a limited period of time: for instance how many people needs your product, services, or professional expertise within a period of one day, one week, one month, many months and in a year or more).

Every other thing required for career success takes product or service quality, your availability, employ-ability, deploy-ability, dependability, reliability, supply-ability, applicability, consistency, focus, ethics, business integrity, business acumen and professionalism.

Moreover, How long can you sustain this your chosen career. Can your career be manageable? Can your career be replicate-able or transferable to the next person or next generation? how long can your chosen career be sustained? Does it insurance policy, that is, can it be indemnified?

Does your career have continuity, is your choice of career viable (i.e. capable of growth and development), etc. These are pertinent and considerable options and questions one needs to consider before making career choices.

What is Career Choice?

Career Choice implies choosing a particular work, discipline, vocation or profession over other related or different fields of career. So many factors can have influence over what a person or a student chooses as his lifetime career, but purpose, needs, skills required among other things can help inform your decision when making career choice. To make a choice means preferring and selecting one thing over other variables or alternatives.

Making Good Career Choice

Considering How to Make Career Choice in Nigeria, Every career choice is good depending on who makes the choice and the derivable self fulfillment from it. Every career choice is good if it is capable of providing or servicing known human needs.

Every career choice is good if it can be monetized for personal economic growth and gratification, including for national growth and development of a society. However, students or anybody can be advised to choose his career in line with the known, discoverable or researchable needs of the society and in accordance to where his energy, passion and self fulfillment can be realizable.

Factors that leads to Wrong Career Choice

1. Environmental Limitation
2. Lack of self awareness or self discovery
3. Lack of good personality development
4. Lack of the relevant skills and training
5. Illiteracy and lack of basic education
6.  Lack of good civilization
7. Lack of modern technologies and other relevant facilities
8. Corrupt government/ bad leadership
9. Bad educational policies or bad implementation of good educational policies
10. Poverty and lack or inadequacy of career funding
11. Lack of focus and self discipline
12. Poor mentorship and bad orientation
13. Insecurity, social unrest and social political instability
14. Poor economic policies by the government
15. Lack of leverages and social-economic amenities, such like power and energy
16. Bad remuneration can also discourage the right career choice
17. Peer influence and pressure
18. Parental dissuasion and persuasion
19. Professional Aggrandizement and discrepancy
20. Monetary enticement/inducement or attraction

Implications of Making Bad Career Choices

Making bad career choice is when a student or a person is misled or badly influenced by any of the above highlighted  factors that leads to wrong career choice and he ended up not engaging him/herself in a career sector which does not suit his abilities, passion and drive thereby affecting badly his personal growth, development and self fulfillment or actualization. Making bad career choices can lead to the following negative implications, below:

1. Poor performance
2. Lack of fulfillment
3. Lack of good growth development
4. Lack of joy and peace of mind
5. Abuse of office or position
6. Poor management
7. Laxity and lackadaisical attitude towards duties and responsibilities
8. Little or no gratification
9. Instability in career endeavors
10. Lack of proper focus
11. Bad productivity

Implications of Making Good Career Choices

1. Excellent performance
2. Self fulfillment
3. Good growth and development
4. Derivable joy and peace of mind
5. Well managed position and viable office
6. Effective management
7. Diligence towards duties and responsibilities; no dull moments
8. Derivable gratification
9. Stability in one’s chosen career
10. Proper Focusing to one’s primary assignment
11. Productivity to the highest esteem
12. Career success

Developing a Model of Good Career in Nigeria

How to make career choice in Nigeria entails a lot of commitment and research. To be able to fit into Nigeria workforce, you need to develop a model of good career that is viable in the Nigerian environment. The failure to developing a good model of career in Nigeria has contributed badly towards economic instability, poverty and underdevelopment of the country Nigeria.

So many factors has hampered students from coming out easily successful in the various career choices they made.  All these has to do with unfavorable social, economic and political environment among other Nigerian factors. This has lead Nigeria students to either seek the quality education from diaspora or to migrate to foreign land for proper remuneration that meets their job and career fulfillment.

According to a research work: Career Planning and Development: The Realities in Nigerian Organizations, by Christine. A. Nwuche and Hart .O. Awa wrote: “Traditionally, individuals are expected to take responsibility for planning and developing their careers. Decisions concerning the desired skill, occupation or the organization to work have been regarded as essentially personal. Very often, before individuals join organizations, they would have already made occupational choices via the subjects and courses taken at educational institutions. In this scheme, a career is conceived as “the successive progress of an employee in his chosen field of work throughout life” (Oladunni, 1998:72); “a development process of an individual along a path of different work experiences and jobs in one or more organizations” (Foong–ming, 2008:2). To emphasize the active part the individual plays in creating his or her career, Inkson (2008) conceptualizes career as, among other metaphors, a journey, story, action and series of roles.”

Eminently, student in Nigeria can model a good career towards those legitimate sectors of needs in Nigeria that will engage them mostly in meaningful vocations and artisan: such as fashion and design industry, upholstery, shoe making, leather bag making, relevant industrial skills, civil engineering, medical and pharmaceutical sciences, nursing sciences, agriculture, aquaculture, horticulture, fish farming and production.

Others include computer sciences: software and hardware engineering, web designing and development, graphic designing, video editing and cinematography, blogging and online publishing, social commentators, social content creator, smart phone app developer, importation and exportation, e-commerce, social marketing, product marketing and distribution, commerce and industry, banking and finance, insurance, fin-tech services, blockchain, SMSE etc,

Some of these model of good careers can be learnt or studied in formal educational sectors, and so many of them you can engage yourself in training as apprentice, or visit special skill acquisition centers in the non-formal and private sector to master and develop your passionate career.