XFIRE’S DIARY: It is not always the best that get the best jobs, or become the most successful

MY CAREER DIARY

with

XFIRE

I am a graduate of one of the public universities in Nigeria, and I currently work in Nigeria’s oil and gas industry. I am sharing my experience under the pen name XFIRE.

From the few ways of job hunting I discussed yesterday, you can see that searching for job, or starting up a business is a job in itself. It’s serious business and if you wanna reach the height of your career, you will keep on aiming for jobs / businesses that will help you reach your goal. This will lead me to another lesson:

LESSON 7: It is not always the best that gets the best jobs, or becomes the most successful; Many a time, it is that person with the most information.information available. I always had such relevant information in my fingertips. When I was an undergraduate, I never missed any undergraduate scholarship advert. I always asked around and thankfully, I got the right information. I knew about scholarship programmes of Shell, Chevron, Total, Addax, PanOcean, Mobil, non-oil related scholarships, etc. At the end of the day, I won two.

It will surprise you that many of my colleagues who were quite brilliant didn’t enjoy any scholarship, simply because they didn’t know about them! Same goes for job hunting. I don’t work in an IOC necessarily because I am the best. But it will surprise you that many of the first class graduates in my set are still working in smaller companies, just because they didn’t apply for the bigger jobs. Today, a former coursemate of mine (who is first class graduate) calls me regularly asking me to keep him informed whenever there are job openings or opportunities. He simply failed to apply for major job openings when I was applying.

Same principle of information gathering applies for aptitude/skills tests, job interviews, career advancement and investment. I will elaborate on them in due course