The Need to Understand the World of Professions and Make Professional Decisions

: This article emphasizes the importance of understanding the world of professions for members of any society, especially students in different school stages. This is important to develop their professional awareness from kindergarten to post-basic education in the university stages. This progressive development of students' professional awareness leads them to make the appropriate professional decisions in life according to specific and clear standards, principles, controls and appropriate educational methods. The article addresses essential points that can be referred to as guidelines in understanding the world of occupations, preserving the student’s personality in the future, and achieving satisfaction with himself, his profession and economic and social level. The most important of these points are vocational guidance and its relationship to vocational education, professional self-concept, steps in professional decision-making, factors affecting professional decision making and general instructions for appropriate professional decision-making.


Introduction:
Making crucial decisions in life is always challenging.Human beings make different decisions; some of them are very easy to make, but others are often complicated and make people concerned about making the best ones in their lives.Choosing a profession and deciding about future jobs is one of the most essential issues educators consider nowadays.A job is not only a tool through which to gain money, but it shapes the lifestyle of a person and his/ her role in society.Choosing a profession is a step-by-step decision-making process that helps students make more thoughtful and solid decisions that suit them according to their abilities, talents, and values.Usually, what people are good at indicates their professional interests.Early adolescence is when people start thinking about professional decisions; it is when they think about their life, future, and goals.Professional decisions are affected by people's experiences at home, school, society, and the neighbouring environment.To make the right and correct professional decision, it is vital to study about different professions and jobs world, get expert guidance and support, and think about self-values, self-abilities, and interests.This article discusses how to make the right and correct professional decisions that provide psychological and professional satisfaction for people.It also discusses the support, preventive, and curative guidance needed during professional decision-making.Many students face difficulties when making professional decisions and choosing a suitable profession, especially during this era of scientific and technological explosion.Therefore, it is essential to study the professions because jobs are changing and developing, some are disappearing, and new jobs are created because of the rapid life changes.This will give them a clear picture of what jobs are good for them.

What is professional guidance and counseling?
It is a systematic and planned process that aims to help people understand their abilities, talents, and the world's working environment to make the correct professional decisions to achieve job satisfaction.Frank Parsons, who pioneered professional development, noticed that although the government of Boston provided jobs for some young people, they did not want to work, and this created a challenge for society.Parsons established an association that believes people have the right to be guided to the jobs available using a planned process.

Parson's plan for career guidance consists of three actions:
1. Analysis of the personality traits of the person whose career is being planned.2. Analysis of the character traits of the job 3. The decision-making stage involves correspondence between the individual and his capabilities and linking them to the professional he desires and appreciates.It is essential to provide professional guidance services for young people to help them overcome their challenges and difficulties.At the same time, they make their professional decisions and are encouraged to make their own decisions without involving families and peers.There needs to be more clarity between professional guidance and professional selection.The first helps them acquire complete knowledge of their abilities, skills, and role in the world of professions.The second deals with jobs and helps find the most suitable candidate for a vacant job.Therefore, it is essential to differentiate between them.

Vocational guidance and its relationship to vocational education
Vocational guidance begins as a paving process for professional education and continues to accompany it until the individual grows appropriate; the goal determines the difference between them.If the goal is to help the individual choose the profession, prepare for it and join it, the process is professional guidance.If the goal is to prepare for a chosen profession, the process is vocational education or professional training.Although the two differ, each one is necessary for the other.Vocational education is a series of experiences which prepare people for specific occupations that they choose from the occupation world according to their values and interests.The school's role is to use programs to train and prepare students for the correct professional decision-making.People go through different professional phases throughout their school lives, and each has its own characteristics; these help them understand the professional world.The table below shows these phases and their characteristics.

N Phase
Level/Grade Characteristics 1 Vocational awareness KG-Gr 6 -Self-awareness -Awareness of the vocational world -Awareness of the importance of work -Clarification of the concepts of self -Self-building -Building of acceptable social behaviours.
-Understanding of the basic economic needs for professional planning.

Professional Preparation
Secondary level Gr11-Gr12 -Building knowledge of how to get into the work.
-Estimating the work habits and work ethics.
-Understanding the social and psychological factors related to work.
-Implementation of professional training plans.
-Clarifying interests and tendencies related to individual capabilities towards professions.

After School
Universities, collages, and vocational training centres.
-Emphasis on professional choice and its relation to people's interests.
-Development of specific professional skills, knowledge, and personal skills to enter the professional field.

Professional self-concept:
Understanding and discovering self-abilities is very essential to making the correct professional decisions.Neglecting it might lead to difficulty achieving goals, professional confusion, and lack of satisfaction.
According to Zahran, professional self-understanding is everything related to the impression of the individual about himself in his field of work.
It can be defined procedurally as everything that the individual perceives about himself, from his personality traits, abilities, capabilities, tendencies, and potential energy, to benefit from them and exploit them optimally in the professional field.

The World of Professions (Professions Concepts Dictionary)
There is no doubt that professional decision-making is one of the most important decisions people make, especially in places with a high population, availability of various jobs, and an increase in social, psychological, technological, and economic living requirements.This makes professional decisionmaking an individual issue related to satisfaction towards a specific job and a social issue since it affects the distribution of the workforce in society.
The first stage of professional counselling involves understanding and knowing one's abilities, values, and interests.Then comes the second stage, which is the professional counselling process that helps individuals understand the wide world of professions in order to help them review the world of different professions and compare, analyze, and classify them according to what suits their interests, abilities, tendencies, and personal characteristics and then to have a detailed study to know them in depth.
In the year 1939, in the United States of America, a job placement office prepared a job dictionary that defined 40000 professional jobs after analyzing thousands of jobs in different industries.This dictionary provided professional information about jobs and how they relate to each other and was widely used by most professional counselling offices.

Professional Decision Making:
It is noted that students need to choose the specialization they want to join at universities using a scientific objective-based method.They do not choose according to their abilities, skills, and knowledge about the labour market.However, their professional decisions are influenced by job status in society, by parents or peers.They do not consider that all these factors will lead to adverse effects on both people and society.Therefore, there was a need to support students, guide them, and provide them with professional counselling to prepare them to make the correct decisions that would provide them with psychological and occupational satisfaction.
If people make the correct professional decision, they will avoid facing many problems they might face when they join the labour market.People must discover their talents, values, and abilities and put them in a framework that helps them choose the occupation that suits them best.

Steps of professional decision-making:
According to AL Azza (2006), professional decision-making is an essential, systematic, organized, and complete process consisting of steps that help students make the correct decision.These steps are: 1. Defining the problem.

Factors that affect professional decision-making.
There are several factors affecting professional decision-making making tendencies, capabilities, professional preferences, self-concepts, growing stages, success and failure experiences, availability of data and information, family, school, friends and peers, chances, society and traditions, personal values, educational level, childhood experiences personal features and other factors that are related to the professions.

How do you define your professional goal?
As Al Hamid (2010) noted, defining professional goals is critical to planning an individual's professional life track.Therefore, people should be very cautious and set goals that they can achieve, capable of fulfilling their needs and their view regarding future work-life.
When setting professional goals, some elements should be taken into consideration: 1. Life determinants include goals, values, abilities, preferences, and desires.2. Current and future labour market characteristics, career life cycle, supply and demand analysis and realistic path.3. Monitor the continuous variables of the goal and path.4. Flexibility of the professional goal, especially in the early years.

General guidelines for appropriate occupational decision-making:
Each needs guidance and direction, especially when deciding on any area of his life.Since the professional decision is an important and crucial decision in an individual's life, some general guidelines are reviewed below for making the appropriate decision.1. Setting goals since childhood motivates people to move forward towards achieving them by acquiring the correct skills for the career they target and makes them self-motivated.2. Because of the rapid and continuous change in the professional world and the increasing demand for joining professions, all educational institutions, parents, and professional counselling offices should provide updated data about professions.3. Motivating individuals to take responsibility since childhood by helping them discover themselves and helping them to find alternatives, and acquire skills that help them make correct professional decisions 4. Developing positive attitudes and values of the world of professions as well as manual work and instilling them among individuals to help them choose the correct occupation according to their abilities, interests, and knowledge of the occupation world. 5. Educational institutions must care for academically and professionally outstanding students by preparing the correct training programs and helping them use their abilities and skills correctly.6. Students need to have a complete understanding of their academic and intellectual level.This is necessary to plan for the future realistically; they should also be directed that work is a way of life and that education is a stage of preparation for the professional world.7. The idea of a single profession throughout life has become impractical in contemporary societies; it must be replaced by an idea that is more flexible and subject to change, where individuals can practice several different professions throughout their lives.This is evidence of the development of professional thinking and taking it as a strategy to choose professions.8.It is essential to educate parents about changes occurring in the professional field through visible, audio, and reading brochures and advertisements to contribute to directing their children towards the appropriate professions.9. Providing Professional awareness is essential for students.It can be done by organizing programmed visits for them to schools and professional centres to get to know them closely.It can be done by inviting specialists to hold programmed and targeted meetings with them to talk about issues related to educational and work opportunities, as well as using various media to spread information related to professional awareness.
10.There are several fundamental trends in vocational guidance, and most emphasize the importance of individual personality traits, abilities, individual differences between individuals, and personal patterns in the professional field.All this calls for interest in applying some professional standards and tests to individuals, especially students, to determine the type of profession the students want to choose after completion.These are the Occupational Maturity Scale, Self-Discovery Test Extra for professional study planning, Know Your Interest, Multiple Intelligence, and others.

Happy professional compatibility:
With the rapid and significant change in the professional field, many traditional expectations among individuals continued to affect the planning process of choosing a work or profession.Professional mentors realized that people build their expectations for the future based on the past.This motivated them to work on helping individuals to know the world of the profession and the opportunities it currently contains.
The last and vital step in professional guidance for the individual is to accept his profession and income and be satisfied with his social status so he can adapt to the problems he encounters and try to solve them.

Conclusion:
Proper professional guidance towards making the right decisions and the ability to choose the right profession enable individuals to achieve the best compatibility between themselves and the world of occupation, ensuring their happiness, competence and satisfaction with their studies and professions.This will positively affect their career, family, social and psychological life and increase their respect for their professions.

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Development of concepts, skills related to self-awareness and labor market.-Development of the occupational knowledge.-Development of decision-making skills.-Development of factors related to career selection.Development of professional knowledge.-Evaluation of the role of work -Development of the knowledge of the social and psychological factors related to work.