We will get straight to the point. There is a lot of talk going on if degrees are important for careers, and on the other side several employers (mainly in the IT sector) are pushing their workforce to undergo specialized courses in latest technologies. This post describes the importance of education as well as career, and how both may not always be necessarily related to each other.
Education
This has several levels including primary education, school levels, under graduation, and post-graduation. Primary education as well as schooling is kind of a birth-right and you go where your parents take you. But then you have a choice while taking under graduation. This is where you think of what you want to be or which industry interests you more. Hence, education gives you an idea of which career to choose but it need not compulsorily choose your career for you.
Next is the concept of certifications. There are several types of certifications depending on the industry. Examples include certification of soft skills such as communication, certifications in computer courses and programming, certifications in accounting, and many more. The difference between certifications and basic education is that certifications make you specialized in particular activities and give you qualifications for relevant professions.
Career
A career is primarily your objective in life. What do you want to do? What you wish to achieve? This can mostly revolve around money that you want to earn for a livelihood. But how do you wish to earn it? That is partially your choice and the remaining split between what you learnt and what you are good at. Certifications make you good or qualified for a particular career. However, it is not essential that you have to be in that career. This comparison can be described by comparing the jobs of several in the IT sector.
Please note that the example of IT sector is repeated in this post as it is one of the biggest employers in India. So, taking cue from the example of the IT sector; you may find the workforce having diverse qualifications. Most of them qualified in different streams of engineering. But you also find several Mechanical Engineers employed in this industry. What is the relation between their education and work? They could have chosen careers more specific to their stream; but they chose the I.T sector.
A better example would be that of movies. Do all actors have certifications of acting and/or communication with them? The legendary Amitabh Bachan is a Major in Science and Arts and Tamil Actor Arya is an engineering graduate! So, why did they choose this career if they were qualified for something else?
The bottom line is specialized certifications may make you qualified for a particular job but it may not be the exact job that you wish to choose. So, learn more only for your career, but also to make you a more skilled and qualified professional. In this way, you will have a choice of multiple careers.
Remember, career is essentially made with the help of all the information one has gained out of education. Also, a career provides us with life challenge and here we can put our education to practical use. Choose wisely what you wish to learn because that is the point. You learn for knowledge, and certificates are only proof of what you have learnt. It need not necessarily mean what you can achieve or what you will achieve.
“Choose a job you love and you'll never have to work a day in your life” – Confucius
About the Author
Yasir Sulaiman is an acclaimed author of 6 books (fiction). A summary of his other responsibilities includes being a poet, a YouTube presenter, a Technical Writer, a social media promoter, client coordinator, and a freelance communicative English tutor.