At what point in your life were you able to decide what you wanted to be?
A doctor, a teacher, an engineer, a scientist, a musician or police officer.
To figure out what you want to be is one thing. To figure out how to get there is the second.
For some people it is an easy decision and then there are those where this is or was a difficult one.
One of those steps is an education which allows you, when you have that piece of paper, to apply for the job. The many steps on the ladder: Choose, study, pass and apply for the job.
Don’t get me wrong. I make it sound easy, but that is not the case with everyone.
The ladder on which you have to start climbing to reach for the top. To become what you want to be.
For me personally, that ladder is still there and I’m still asking myself the same question.
“What do I want to be?”
The reason for that is that most of my life was not to figure out what I wanted to do in my life or how to get there, but merely survive the day ahead.
From an early moment in my life, my ladder so to say was not a visible one.
For some, unfortunately, the ladder is not as easy to visualize or to climb.
It’s filled with gaps, missing steps, the ladder is not a ladder to begin with or there is none at all. Is that person in a position to even ask themselves the question ‘What do I want to be in life?’ But rather, ‘Will I be able to?’ Someone’s life can be so chaotic with so many things going on, the mere thought of an education seems like a distant dream.
To achieve something. To become someone.
What I want to say to you with this article is that it can be possible to achieve something without a high degree. The highest education on my resume is MBO4 Biotechnology. No bachelor's degree, no masters, no PhD. Based on this education level, the only thing I could’ve done was testing samples on a daily routine basis. But that’s not where I am now. And it doesn’t have to be the same for you. At the moment, I’m the assistant Quality Manager for an Irish food industry which (they say) you need a bachelor’s degree. As a minimum.
I’m 31 years old and I’m there, responsible for a team in the quality department, auditing, (T)(V)HACCP, improving the standards, root cause analysis and risk assessments on food safety, defense, fraud and quality. And my next step? Who knows. Who knows where that ladder is going to take me. All I know is that I’m going to start climbing and adapt to whatever this broken ladder is going to throw at me to reach for the top.
The start of my climb may not have been an easy one, but my next step moving forward is on me.
