The Factors Influencing Career Choices of a Person

This paper states that social, cultural, and geographic, and hereditary contexts influence career choices. Individual characteristics may also play a role as do core beliefs. Specific factors that most immediately affect career choice may include; availability of information, expectations, barriers, interest, economic need, and achievement motivation.

Due to the high numbers of the safari camps and hotels in the region, many people find themselves opting to work in the camps that are surrounding their villages. This may not be a personal choice but may be influenced by the many reasons that have been listed above. Studies shows that over the past few decades there has been a decline in access to traditional organizational career where individuals progressed systematically through a largely vertical career pathway over a prolonged period of employment, Rodrigus and Guest 2010.

Instead, individuals are more likely to be required to engage in less stable ‘new deals’ in employment, (Adamson, Doherty and Viney, 1998). Under less secure conditions for career development, career success has become more greatly predicated on one’s employability and marketability to enable individuals to initiate and manage career change as desired and to guard against career risk.

The role of organizations has, therefore, seen to shift away from interventionist career management to the facilitation of continuous professional development and the enabling of individuals to manage their careers effectively and wisely. Within the field of vocational psychology, several major theories have emerged to explain a process by which individuals make career choices.

According to some of these theories, person-environment fit is most critical, whereby an individual's unique interests, values, and skills are ideally matched to a certain job setting (Dawis & Lofquist, 1984; Holland, 1997). Other theories view individuals as being in a constant state of development, in which the optimal career is one that best facilitates the implementation of a person's current self-concept (Savickas, 2002; Super, 1990).

Theories that emphasize social learning and cognition have also been advanced. According to these theories, an individual's learning experiences about work and perceived ability to perform particular tasks that are necessary to succeed in a certain career are vital to decision making (Krumboltz, 1996; Lent, Brown, & Hackett, 1994).

Although these theories differ in substantive ways, all focus primarily on influence of an individual's internal goals, needs, and pursuit of satisfaction in career decision making. This commonality carries an implicit assumption that individuals making career decisions have the volition to do so and are primarily seek their own satisfaction.

However, recent work throughout the social sciences has demonstrated that these assumptions may be unfounded, because decisions are often made with limited options or in a collectivist context (e,g,. Blustein, McWhirter, & Perry, 2005; Jackson, Colquitt, Wesson, & Zapata-Phelan, 2006; Oyserman, Coon, & Kemmelmeier, 2002),Background Information of the StudyAn environment plays an important role in what a child would become in the future, this is in relation to the kind of career hey choose to do or even end up doing not because they chose to but because they were influenced by something in the environment they live in.

Over the years, challenges have been made in relation to traditional theories of career choice. One of the challenges has been to consider the contexts in which individuals live and how it can influence career choices.

The purpose of this model is to create a framework to explain the influences on career choices over the lifespan especially in the Ngami land areas where we find a lot of camps due to its nature of tourism. The term "career choices" as used in this model refers not only to initial occupational choice, but also to all those choices made previously and subsequently that influence occupation or job. This study was influenced by my childhood background even though I was born and raised in Maun, I have many cousins who lived in the remote areas of Maun where it’s only accessible in certain seasons, due to the many rivers and swamps.

Growing up in such environment made me think about how blessed I was, looking at the many opportunities that I thought were available, only to realize that I was wrong when I was mature enough to distinguish between facts and fantasies. The area has few schools and from way back we had only one senior secondary school for the entire region, and to me this is somehow de motivating.

There are lots of small villages which are recognized by coordinates even though these small villages have their own names, these villages are surrounded by many safari camps and lodges which are not owned by the natives, as they are only hired to do the laboring. The community members are only hired to be cooks, drivers and guides which are less paying jobs and an employee has to spend 3 full months at work and only 21days of leave days.

There are also, many community or villages TRUSTS (this word would be used in this study to refer to a group of villagers who are voted democratically to form a board that will help manage any resources that are found in their village, for example revenue, land and this board would be given a certain period of time to be in the board and after the time elapse, a new board would be elected) that influence or force the management of these camps to hire people from these villages that they have businesses in, this may also result in children especially adolescents, who would have such information to leave school, dropout or even lose interest in academics because they would be knowing that there is no need for them to attain hire education.

One of the small villages around Maun called Sankuyu, is an example among the many other villages that the research would include, and the village has a Trust which uses its revenue to provide employment to people of Sankuyo Village and to fund community projects. According to the Namib web page; currently the Trust has employed 39 permanent staff as cleaners, drivers, community escort guides, camp staff and various office positions. There are also Community projects which include the building of a community hall with DSTV, the supply of water to all households, the building of destitute houses, the sponsorship of the football club, funeral grants and scholarships.

In 2010 the Trust sponsored 21 students for various courses such as tourism and hospitality, business management, housekeeping, chef training and driving school training. Indeed, the effects of low water levels have been widespread, “directly affecting the local communities who have survived on the water systems around them,” he says. “Water for livestock has also been a challenge as farmers depend on the rivers around here and they have been forced to look around for water further afield for their animals.

“This state extends to the day-to-day use of water by the communities, and should the situation continue, it will have devastating effects for this whole area,” says Mosimanyana. The people who live around the delta depend much on the activities or job around them, one this was reported in the Arican Business magazine in 1April 2016 where they reported on the issue of Drought due to low in flow of water in the delta and the situation has made many residents crying of starvation because they depended much on the tourism industry.

One resident, Arnold Mothobe, a junior guide from Xhaxhaba, an island village within the Delta, nervous. “This is the lowest I’ve seen the Delta, there just isn’t any water coming from the flood plains,” he says. Mothobe worries that, without the rains, he will struggle to make ends meet. “Guiding tourists is what I depend on. Should things continue this way, I don’t know where things will stand. We will be devastated as a community.

“We are people of the river and it’s all we know, so it is worrying seeing water levels like this at a time we had expected it to be a lot higher,” he says. He is not the only concerned local. Elijah Lesole, a boat captain who has ferried world travellers across the Delta for over 20 years, paints a similar picture. “It was a struggle getting people around in the peak period, we would get our boats stuck on sandbanks. Now it’s totally impossible to get boats in the channels from Maun, leaving us with little work. Now people fly in chartered light aircraft. ”