In Nigeria, it is believed that medical doctors, lawyers, and engineers are respected and well-paid. Therefore, many parents try to make their children study courses related to these professions even when their children don’t have a passion for the courses.
However, in recent times career experts have been encouraging parents to allow their children to choose a profession based on their strength and interest.
Reacting to the issue, the College-and-Careers Guidance Counsellor of Greenspring School, Soluzo Ekenta said, “there is nothing wrong with parents recommending that their children should study courses that can get them lucrative jobs. In the past, those courses include medicine, law, and engineering.
“But there are many other unpopular courses that also guarantee lucrative jobs and in our new information technology (IT) age, there are hundreds of new lucrative IT-based jobs.”
Soluzo suggested that instead of parents forcing their children to study courses that are believed to be lucrative, they should encourage them to study courses based on their strength and interest.
“At Greensprings School, our goal is to give our students a quality education that builds a solid foundation for whatever course they want to study in the university or college. We also guide them to choose courses based on their strength and passion.
“Towards the end of last year, we launched our careers, college and university readiness centres and introduced a new software called Maia Learning. The software enables our secondary school students to take personality tests and the results are used to recommend courses that suit the personality of each student.
“The students get to discover their areas of strengths and learn about profitable courses that are in line with their passion. And as it turned out, the students and their parents are happy because the software helped both to achieve their objectives.”
Soluzo encourages parents to listen to their children when it is time to choose a course of study, adding that children should be allowed to study courses that they are passionate about and related to their area of strength.
