What’s the essence of your profession? Careers are usually organised around professions and these tend to be responsible for specific fields within societies. Lawyers take care of laws, dentists are responsible for teeth, anthropologists look at culture, civil engineers focus on structures and do on. To have a title is linked to a particular domain and therefore to a range of jobs. Within the EU this is even more stressed by the fact that many regulations define domains, conditions, licenses and other entry criteria to practice a profession.
However, this approach might lead individuals to close-end roads. This is even more evident and common with migrants. When migrating, at least two barriers must be faced if you assume your career from this perspective: diplomas, norms and regulations and, social recognition.
Within the EU there is a dominant trend to associate jobs with diplomas. If you want to develop a project or practice any activity often you will be asked about your diplomas. But even if you have any, the equivalences among titles are far from been standardised. What is considered to be a dentist in the US or in Thailand is not the same as the education provided by a Dutch institution. Except for most liberal professions, diplomas, norms and regulations are important entry barriers.
The second large barrier, social recognition has a different nature. The accumulated experience and the gained recognition in your home country loose most of their value and relevance in the new country. Your previous success stories lack the support of your customers and their capacity to refer new ones or to spread the word about your good performance. Let shine your competencies and create new ways ahead.
To overcome these barriers a different approach to professions is required; one not related to fields of work but instead to competencies and skills. Using the lawyer example, someone having such title is more than a law expert. That person can handle long pieces of text, analyse them, find connections within and even memorise them; he might be very good in finding relations, obstacles or opportunities using context information; might have the ability to compare business practices among different cultures, or to solve conflicts and conduct negotiations.
A dentist would be someone with valuable hand-skills, a well-developed sight, etc. with knowledge about healthy alimentation and experience to work in a one-to-one relation with customers. An anthropologist would have relevant competencies to observe and find out similarities and differences among groups of people, might have skills to look at present trends and compare them with past ones or forecast future ones.
The challenge is to portrait your competencies beyond a particular profession and a field of practice. You are who are independently of such context elements. By Identifying these competencies and strengths you have, related to your profession but firmly rooted into your personality and life history, you gain a completely different point of reference.
To decide which path to follow in order to continue developing your career becomes then a nice challenge for your imagination. You are beyond the profession-job framework and therefore you are out of the diploma-regulations-social control barriers. You are free to decide and create your own way. So my advice would be: re-visit your CV and look to the type of activities you have been involved, organise them and find out which ones provided you more inspiration, launched your creativity and made you happy.
