AT THIS TIME of year sixth year students are faced with the challenging task of deciding what route to follow next year. This task can be equally challenging for parents. Because we are more experienced, we feel that we should be imparting knowledge and advice.

We may also be very fearful that, if we do not provide this for our children, they may never find their niche and be left behind. Meanwhile, other young people around seem to be able to find the perfect course and the perfect career. If we see our loved ones faltering, it's very easy to feel a failure as a parent.

Some parents tell me they don't care what their children do as long as they are happy. This seems to work as long as we don't ask the question: `will we know when they are happy?' No matter what way we look at it this challenging time forces us - and our children - to ask many fundamental questions:

What does it really mean to be successful?

Do I even know what I really want? Do I know my real strengths?

Do I know what aspects of my personality I would like to bring to the fore in my career?

How important is money to me?

How important is social position to me?

What do I hope to gain from all the years of work ahead of me?

Where do I fit in the global scheme of things?

What am I on this earth to do? What contribution can I make?

My personal philosophy on choosing a career may not stand up to in depth metaphysical scrutiny, but it's very important to me in my work as a careers consultant. While I certainly cannot give you the key to your child's happiness, I hope that I can give you some useful thoughts.

I believe that each of us has very specific, individual talents which are very much needed by the world in which we live. Each one of us is asked to place our own little piece in the global puzzle. The identification and the honing of these talents is part of a process which is the work of a lifetime. Our life's path is made up of a myriad of individual decisions and actions, but the path is already created once we take the first step.

It's age old wisdom to say that we are most gifted in the tasks which we love doing. A fulfilling career is one where we are using the type of intelligence we are most comfortable using. This career will be in an area which fascinates us. The more we are fascinated by our area, the more we will want to learn about it and generate new ideas.

A mere `job' then becomes an interest, a challenging learning process where we learn more about the area we work in and more about ourselves. When we become more productive, we are more rewarded. The more we are rewarded, the more fascinated we become with what we are doing - it's a bountiful circle!

The more we become involved with our environment, the more we will receive. The more we give and receive, the more fulfilled we feel. We find we are contributing to ourselves, to our families, to people we may work with and to our friends.

You may well ask at this stage if this process is so marvellous and natural, how come so many of us - hate our jobs? The reasons are many and varied.

Perhaps the most obvious reason is because in the past we were never taught that enjoying your work was possible. Work was left to the working classes and, if you were working class in the last century, you were miserable.

Alternatively, we may have chosen our jobs out of fear. We may have been taught that jobs were scarce and our potential was low, so we should take the first job that comes along.

Perhaps the most common reason for finding ourselves in the wrong job is that we never knew what we wanted in the first place. We had little idea what area we were most intellectually capable in. We may even have had no idea as to what - career area would motivate us and we possibly had no notion how to - link our individual personality with our eventual career.

When choosing a career it can be so helpful to get an objective assessment of our skills. First, we can identify exactly the type of activity with which we are most intellectually comfortable. We may be very uncomfortable with academic skills, but we may be highly gifted in the creative area. There are also questionnaires which can assess which career areas we are most interested in and which we would most hate.

We may be very gifted in maths, but we might hate to work with them. Once we have these two areas aligned, we can then look at our preferred way of thinking and behaving in the workplace. We may have expressed an interest in marketing but, if we find out that we are the type of person who likes to work on our own and is uncomfortable with strangers, we might then learn that marketing is not the most appropriate choice.

While tests are very helpful, and objective assessments are very useful as a springboard for discussion, we must also take the personal, emotional and spiritual levels into account - our entire life view.

Throughout our lives we have hopes and dreams and set ourselves goals. When we objectively assess our intellectual aptitudes, our career interests and our personality traits, we then need to access our internal monitor. We may ask ourselves questions such as these:

How does this information feel for me?

How does it fit into my world view?

What further steps could this decision lead to?

What impact would this action have on the people who matter most to me?

Does it lead me towards my hopes - and dreams?

Only we can answer these questions for ourselves. But the nice thing to know is that the decision we are about to take is not the definitive one which will trap us for the rest of our lives. The nature of life is change. There is no such thing as finding the perfect job which we will do for exactly the same way for the rest of our life and stay perfectly happy.

The best analogy I have heard is that of the airline pilot. We imagine a pilot plotting a course from Dublin to Paris. In fact the pilot is constantly aided by a host of ground staff and instruments. The course is constantly checked and corrected and can be seen as a combination of thousands of separate decisions and actions, not one single, solid entity.

So it is with the course we choose in our lives. When we identify and align our needs on the material, personal, emotional and spiritual levels, we take the first step on the road. The actual road we follow is chosen by a series of decisions, actions and events - a process which we are continually checking and correcting.

How will I recognise the activity that suits me best? The answer to this is absurdly simple - it is the task you find easiest to do. It is the one you get lost in and when you look at your watch you wonder where the time went. It's the one you think about and bore your friends to death talking about.

When you are happy doing something, you are accessing your natural ability, so you are good at it. When you are good at a job, you are productive. When you are productive you are happier and you make more money. When you are fulfilled, the world is good to you and you are good for the world.