I hate the term “reality check”. It’s used a lot in the career advisory space.
My issue is it does not encourage pursuing ambitious goals.
I much prefer the term “risk assessment”.
I’m all for exploring whether my clients have done a decent risk assessment around the choices they are taking. This might involve desk based research to see how competitive getting into a certain occupation is, reaching out to someone working in the industry to gather further insight and potentially exploring plan B/C/D… in case plan A does not work out.
I was working recently with someone who wanted to apply to be a European Astronaut. It was highly unlikely they would be selected. But they were aware of this and wanted to apply anyway….absolutely nothing wrong with this and my role was to help them make their application as strong as possible.
In fact for any one individual – it is highly unlikely they get selected…there were 8,413 completed applications for 4 positions to the last ESA recruitment round in 2008. However, if you were to ask everyone considering it to do a “reality check” you would probably have zero applications! However, if you ask them to do a risk assessment, they may understand it’s a highly competitive selection process and decide to do it anyway.
For people at an early stage of their career – maybe looking to apply to the ESA in 2030 (!) – pursuing qualifications and life experiences that set them up to make strong applications (e.g. being test pilot, living abroad, being in situations where good judgement skills are required) may also seem like a shot in the dark…but if Plan A doesn’t work out, think of all the other options they would have open to them with the amazing transferable skills they would have developed!
PS. I had to upskill on Europass CVs in order to help this client…check back soon for an upcoming post on all things Europass!