The Kenya Universities and Central Placement Board (KUCCPs) has announced a window for form leavers to review their career choices. As they do these reviews, they should be guided by eight key issues. First is the evaluation of their workstyles to ensure that careers go hand in hand with their workstyles like ability to work under pressure and for long hours. Secondly is knowledge of their talents because it is more rewarding financially and motivation wise working in a career that you like. Thirdly is going for careers that match future financial goals and projections. Fourthly is choosing careers worth the investments to be made to complete it. Fifthly is assessing personal social needs because a human being spends approximately one third of their life in the chosen career and hence with colleagues in the field. Sixth is undertaking thorough background checks, getting information from the industry about career choices including asking the experts in the chosen fields, their experiences and real-life situation of the career path one is interested in. Seventh is being guided by online assessment tools to gauge aptitudes and likely career lines.
Eighth, in addition to the traditional careers like Engineering, Medicine, Law and teaching, there is need to be innovative by considering at least ten courses that have high potential for development and growth in the foreseeable future. These includes Coding which is rapidly changing to be a highly sought-after area of study and skill by technology companies and by the researchers. The course will take students to areas like programming, video game design, development of creative machine learning sounds and building web applications which have massive applications. Secondly is blockchain development and hence blockchain technology that will define and revolutionize the future of finances – think of cryptocurrencies – Bitcoins. Blockchain technology can be used across industries, car, and music businesses, and it has been successfully used to prevent fraud and allocate royalties to artist respectively. Thirdly one can study big data analyst courses because data analysis is key for making predictions and hence help to make the right decisions. Fourthly are areas like ethical hackers, hygiene specialists, Artificial Intelligence (AI), data inspector, /detective, gene experts/portfolio managers, and mental health experts which have been shown to have future demand because of the nature of the global problems of the future.
Dr. Daniel Mutegi Giti 