Individuality and career

Individuality and Career Choices
Name:
Institution:
Individuality and Career Choices
An individual’s personality, in most cases, affects how the individual work. A person’s success in the career path they select, therefore, highly depends on their personal attributes. Career choice should, therefore, blend or conform to a person’s personal characteristics. This paper discusses a few careers that a person can choose and successfully execute based on their personal characteristics. It also provides a correlation between each career that was selected and the prior discussion on temperament, brain dominance, and style. Aside from that, the paper also briefly highlights other aspects of the mentioned jobs like training and financial benefits.
After reading deep into one’s personality with the help of friends and relatives, one could consider choosing careers such as nursing, funeral service and truck driving. To become a good mortician, one first needs to have academic discipline and intelligence (Jurgensen 10). Jurgensen (12) argues that “excellent interpersonal skills are another essential attribute required to succeed in the funeral service industry.” A funeral attendant should be calm emotionally despite the emotional mayhem that he job entails (Jurgensen 13). While sympathy is important, a crucial balance has to be struck between authority and sensitivity for one to be successful in this career (Jurgensen 13). Strength and business insightfulness are other traits that a person needs to possess to help them succeed in the funeral service industry.

A professional funeral attendant receives his training in college for between two to four years in the sciences, arts and counseling (“Funeral service” n. pag.). Arts is considered biased to the right-headed and sciences to the left-headed; therefore, a mortician needs to have a good balance between his less and more prominent part of the brain (Jurgensen 17). The job entails directing the logistics of groups of people at a terrible time of their life. Funeral attendants counsel the mourning families and help them with organizing funeral ceremonies (“Funeral service” n. pag.). A mortician may also be requested, at times, to file the deceased’s death certificate. The average annual salary of a funeral attendant in the United States was about $ 25,000 as at June 2011 (“Funeral Attendant” n. pag.).
Nursing is yet another career that a person with the traits of a mortician can effortlessly succeed in. Just like a funeral attendant, a nurse too has to be emotionally calm at most times to help manage the patients’ stress and anxiety (Jecklin 20). A good nurse needs to be sympathetic and considerate with the patients (Jecklin 22). At the same time, he/she needs to be authoritative to ensure that the patients follow directions that would see them recover promptly (Jecklin 22). Thompson (15) stated that “patience is also crucial to nursing success, just as it is to funeral service success.” Patients are of all manner and character, and most of their families are always worried (Thompson 16). As a nurse, one has to be patient enough to accommodate their worry and always reassure them. Nursing requires more of the left head to excel in the sciences and enough of the right head to help in coming up with creative ways to provide care (Tabloski 5).
For most entry-level nursing jobs, a minimum of a diploma from a recognized college is required (Tabloski 9). A nurse works in hospitals and clinics to provide care to patients by administering drugs and observing the patients (Tabloski 11). He/she also maintains patient records and communicates with doctors regarding their patients (Tabloski 11). The salaries for executing these tasks depend on the rank and the institutional affiliations (“Nurses salaries” 55). However, a Basic Life Support report had it that the median salary for nurses in the U.S. as at 2014 was $66,200 (“Nurses salaries” 59). The upper ten percentile earned about $96, 300 while the bottom ten percentile made below $45,630 (“Nurses salaries” 60). Simply put, nursing is just as important as any other component that contributes to improving capacity and efficiency of healthcare and the quality of life in general (Tabloski 24).
A career as a truck driver does require similar or at least closely related attributes to those mentioned above two. The job is more suited for right-headed people as it requires a lot of creativity to go through certain obstacles during the many trips throughout the career (Janeway 19). Janeway (22) stated that “a truck driver needs to be bold enough to take on any route the job takes him to.” At the same time, he needs to be kind and sympathetic to other road users with smaller vehicles if he gets involved in a complicated situation on the road (Janeway 23). Just like the previous two careers, the job requires patience to succeed. The trucks might break down or get stuck in the mud in the middle of nowhere (Janeway 23). At such times, the driver has to be patient to look for help and wait until it arrives; impatience will only assist in getting a headache (Janeway 24).
Truck driving requires no formal education (Mosher 13). For one to carry out this job, they must have a “Commercial Driver’s License (CDL)” (Mosher 15). A truck driver also needs to have obtained explicit endorsements to be allowed to transport special cargo (Mosher 17). There are training programs in place to teach interested parties how to drive heavy trucks (Mosher 20). What a truck driver does is basically to operate trailers and other big vehicles to move cargo over various distances. Some operate across short distances; say from residential areas to businesses. Other truck drivers cover longer distances and transport non-conventional goods like hazardous supplies. In the United States, a “CDL OTR truck driver” earns an average salary of $66,000 (Monaco and Steffen 80). “An OTR CDL truck driver” earns about $82,000 during a “student truck driver” earns approximately $ 41,000 (Monaco and Steffen 81).
In conclusion, a person’s brain dominance can have a lot of influence on their career choice. But as Jurgensen (19) says, “it is not a case of either, or; one can balance the two ‘heads’ very well.” All of the three careers chosen above require a critical balance between the left and right head. They also require a lot of patience, slow temper, and intelligence; attributes that are existent in many personalities. When choosing a career, it is essential for one to choose one which will bring out the best of their personality. This way, one can passionately carry out their duties to ensure the community rips maximum benefits from their undertakings.

References
“Funeral Attendant.” Salary and Job Description along with Careers and Degrees. Web. 13 Nov. 2015.
“Funeral Services (A.S.).” – FSCJ. Web. 13 Nov. 2015.
“Nurses’ Salaries.” Public Health: 84. Print.
Janeway, R. N. “A Better Truck Drive For Driver And Cargo – Problems And Practical Solutions.” Print.
Jecklin, Karl E. Schaffer. “Nursing Students’ Perceptions of Their Chosen Profession.” Nursing Education Perspectives 1 May 2006. Print.
Jürgensen, Martin Wangsgaard. “The Always-Present Death Behind the Church Door: On the Funeral Bier and Its Emblematic Qualities.” Journal of Early Modern Christianity (2014). Print.
Monaco, Kristen, and Steffen Habermalz. “Wage Inequality of US Truck Drivers.” Labour (2011): 268-85. Print.
Mosher, Matt. Commercial Driver’s License Exam: Complete Prep for the Bus & Truck Driver’s License Exams. 5th ed. Piscataway, NJ: Research & Education Assn., 2011. Print.
Tabloski, Patricia A. Gerontological Nursing. 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson, 2010. Print.
Tabloski, Patricia A. Gerontological Nursing. 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson, 2010. Print