Careers: Think beyond engineering and medicine

My friend, Ms S.K. Manimekalai, an English teacher sent me the following report on a seminar that she attended. I thought it deserves to be brought to more readers. I’m reproducing below the report as it was sent to me.

Ms Pervin Malhotra, Director of Career Guidance India (CARING), New Delhi, is India's top career counsellor. As a columnist in Times of India, her Query Columns reach an audience of 300 million people. Her Career - i - Opener test (www.careerguidanceindia.com) has been helping the youth across the nation to discover the career that is just right for them. A highly informative Career Counselling Session for the Students of Class X and their Parents was conducted by Ms. Pervin on December 29^th, 2018 in the KG Hall of DPS Mathura Road. The session was also attended by the teachers teaching in classes IX and X. The following are the highlights of her keynote address:

Robots are replacing not only mechanical jobs like serving coffee etc., but are also performing activities of an intelligent career like that of playing chess. Human knowledge is constantly evolving. Information is bombarding through internet. Life has no syllabus and careers have no curriculum. So what should be done?

Both parents and students should change their conventional mindset of choosing careers like engineering, IAS, etc. IITs alone cannot guarantee you all success. 85% of Engineering students are unemployable or unemployed today. So no need to be obsessed with MBBS or IIT. Even a Bachelor's degree done neatly well can take them to great levels in their career. For instance, a boy who had done his graduation in journalism was picked up by IBM and he went on to work with Oracle.

Hence, students should be given a chance to explore careers today, because there are about 3550+ careers available today and they are still increasing. We are living in an interconnected world of careers. For example, now there has emerged a new career called Mechatronics from Mechanical Engineering and Electronics. How should we prepare students then?

The process of exploring careers and choosing the right career should be started at a very early stage. Not at the last moment around their exams. They should be made aware about the fact that the knowledge level takes a quantum jump from class X to class XI. Learning should become a continuous habit and it shouldn't be done only for one time success, because an 85% scorer in class X may become a 65% scorer in class XII. Love for learning should be inculcated in the young minds. They should not stop learning only for exams, but also for their life and career after formal education. The habit of Reading Around should be cultivated by them. Reading Around is learning the topics learnt in class further by exploring and studying them through net or other resources, say newspaper, etc. and other things happening in their surroundings.

Students today cannot complain about paucity of time to update themselves on current affairs. The three hours spent on gadgets like mobile phones can easily used otherwise. Mobile phones can be used as a learning tool to update themselves with current affairs. It is a phenomenal learning tool. For example, Quora is a site of experts and experienced people. One can make best use of the information available on this site and become well informed about various issues related to careers and other requirements.

Parents and teachers should make students realise that success can be a trap. Students who score highly in class X may not be as successful in higher classes. They can seek help of tests like 'Career-i-Opener' which might cost them less than a pizza, i.e., Rs. 495. They are certainly not sure of their future career though they announce one to the world. They should be given a chance to explore careers. Besides, we should also help them develop their communication and social skills. Because a career is not just about studies. It is also their ability to socialise and communicate. Communication skill doesn't mean that they should be able to speak in English fluently. They should also be able to listen to what the other person says and understand what they expect. So we should let them develop their social skills as well and become successful in their career.

However, all these skills can only be nurtured by students through hard work. Young people tend to look for a career that doesn't involve so much hard work. But there is no such career that doesn't involve hard work. This should be reiterated and they should be trained to work hard. Then success is all theirs.

Comments

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below. Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth. He called it ‘preventive system’. The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed. Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault. For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy. Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves? Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian. In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically. Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification. In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Search This Blog