BVHS President: Pursue your passion!

Select a career or your career path based on something that you love or that you are passionate about.

This was one of the many pieces of advice offered by President/Founder of the Barbados Vagrants and Homeless Society, Kemar Saffrey. He addressed the Productivity Council’s Schools’ Programme yesterday at the Baobab Tower.

“In terms of you choosing your next career, it has to be a career that you are going to love. I know many times we choose careers based on parents… .Start with what you love. Start with where you have your little passion and go from there because the moment that you go into a career that you don’t want – then you are just wasting your own time.”

Saffrey also encouraged the students, who attend Queen’s College, Alma Parris Memorial Secondary School, Unique High School and The Alleyne School, not to think any idea that they might have is too far-fetched to pursue, and to get themselves hyped about their passion because no one will get hyped about it for them. Additionally, he suggested they could consider becoming entrepreneurs by developing their talents into a small business.

Yesterday’s event was on Day Five in the five-day series of workshops staged during the 2017 “Week of Excellence”. This annual Week commenced last Sunday with a church service.

Karen Collins, Training and Development Officer at the Productivity Council stated she was appreciative of the attendance to yesterday’s event though it was “a little lower than we would have liked.” She said that through it the Council sought “to hear what these young people need in order to excel and how they can manoeuvre the different potholes or challenges in their life.” She added, “we just want them to know that it is about continuous improvement, because productivity, there is the hard side- the organisational side to productivity, but then there is the side that speaks to personal productivity. You can’t have organisational productivity unless there is personal productivity. So we want these young people to understand there are resources available to them, just like how an organisation has resources which we call 'inputs'. There are resources available to you that if you make efficient and effective use of them… [for example,] your talents etcetera, you can use them to achieve the goal that you want to achieve.” (MG)