Professional career x profession: what is the difference?

Understand the difference between professional career and profession is very important to use the most appropriate term for each situation and also to direct your choices when defining what you are going to study or what type of job you want to look for.

What is the difference between professional career and profession?

Professional career is the path you travel during your professional life. A career encompasses positions and companies where you worked, the knowledge you have accumulated and the skills and abilities that you have been developing to grow professionally.

Profession, on the other hand, is what you study. It is more likely that you will be able to choose the profession you will have than the career you will pursue. That is, when taking the entrance exam, you choose the course you want to take and, consequently, the profession you will have. You can be an engineer, physiotherapist, journalist or nutritionist.

Professional career: how to define your career

When choosing a profession, however, you are not necessarily defining the professional career you will pursue. Imagine that you decide to study engineering. You can be an engineer and work on major works. But it can also be that engineer who makes a career in an investment bank. Or you can pursue an academic career and devote yourself to research and university classes. Do you understand the difference?

And that path that your career will follow does not always depend only on your decisions. Often an internship or first job appears that determines your entry into the job market. From there, you gain experience in a certain sector, for example, and have the opportunity to grow there. In a way that you might not have even imagined but it has everything to do with you.

Still, the more clarity you have about the career you want to develop, the more you can direct your choices to achieve your goals. You can create a career path to draw step by step how you will get where you want to go.

However, as the professional career is very dynamic. there is always the possibility that an opportunity could arise in a segment that you have not yet considered. And it can be a good surprise. You can adapt and stay there – even if that wasn’t your first option.

Difficulty in choosing a profession

Choosing a profession is very difficult. For this reason, it is common to see young people finishing high school totally under pressure. There are many options and, in fact, little practical knowledge of what each means.

If you are in that moment, we have good news. Nothing is so definitive when it comes to profession and career. Yes, you can start a course and discover that it is not for you. It can also happen that you are lucky enough to choose a degree without much conviction and discover that it was exactly what you wanted.

Which career to follow and where to start?

If you need to choose a career and don’t know where to start, a vocational test can help a lot. This “test” is, in fact, an instrument that identifies professional interests. There are several of them on the market, but the main idea is this.

To choose a profession, it is also important to know what you like to do and what you learn most easily. That is, you need to know what you stand out in. Knowing this, it is easier to select some courses to think better about each possibility.

Anyway, cAs we have already said, the choice is difficult and nobody has an obligation to know – at 17 or 18 years old – what they will want to do for the rest of their lives. It is important to focus on your decision, but also to understand that you can review it whenever you feel necessary.

Is having more than one profession bad?

Another good news is that there are many ways to redirect your career when you are already graduated and know better what you like and what you know how to do better. Specializations and postgraduate degrees can put your career on the path you want.

You can, for example, be a veterinarian who has an MBA in administration to work for a pharmaceutical company. It can, of course, also be that engineer who studied investments and went to the financial segment.

Having more than one profession is not bad as long as you know where you want to go and direct your learning and career to achieve your goal.

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