Your vision

Your vision

Your first step to graduateness starts with a career vision that is displayed in a practical and tangible manner. Creating your career vision is a continuous process – it changes as you have experiences that shape your interests, skills and values. It is important that your career vision has personal meaning to you since your vision will motivate you to take action in a direction that makes sense in terms of who you are and how you do things. Your career vision is important since it acts as your guide in terms of making decisions about your career. Your career vision will help you to select study-, volunteer- and work experiences to prepare you for a broad range of opportunities related to what you want.

Example

Emmanuel is a first year BCom Logistics student who loves running and enters the Two Oceans marathon every year. As he runs with a club he has the opportunity to brainstorm ideas with others. He asked the club whether their training could be combined with  delivering basics to home-bound pensioners. With the help of Emmanuel, the runners combine their knowledge of the needs of  pensioners with their fitness schedule in order to set up new distributions points in their community. As a result of his involvement
with this project, Emmanuel realises that his original vision of working in the logistics field is still valid. However, he now sees himself applying his logistics knowledge within the non-profit sector where he could assist organisations to get aid to those in need.

Right now your career vision could range from very clear to not clear at all. You can start thinking about or refine your vision by completing the following activities.

Your vision will consist of statements about who you are and what you stand for, as well as what you imagine for yourself in the future (Where are you? Who is with you? What are you doing?).

Two ways to think about your vision are:

1. Reflecting on your experiences and
2. Reflecting on where you see yourself in the future

Reflecting on your experiences (work, studies, volunteer work, community and church activities and other extracurriculur activities) will help you understand your interests, values and skills and how these relate to your career.

Questions to help you reflect on your experiences:

• What happened? (make brief notes of what happened; what did you do?)
• Why? Why did I do specific things?
• How do you feel about what happened? (What was your emotional response to what happened?)
• What did you learn from this? (Make notes about what you learned from these activities)
• Goal setting: Make notes about what you will do next - what are the things you wish to change and how will you do so?

Once you have a number of reflections about your experiences, you need to read through these reflections and identify aspects that stand out for you. What experiences are important to me and help me to grow? What are the things I am most interested in? What kind of people do I most like interacting with?