Five Most Crucial Points to Consider while Planning Career

Selecting a Career is not just about selecting a subject stream or courses or deciding about taking a job.  Career selection is more about acquiring knowledge, Skills and right behaviour to spend life with. Your career will define your identity “Who you are” and will direct rest of your life. It’s our decision today which will make our life Joyous or Miserable, organized or misleading, satisfactory or unacceptable. Let’s see how to get it correct and certain.

1.

Differentiating/ Understanding Career Path, Career Milestone and Career Destination

Research data shows that most of the students make career decision at least 3 times till they pursue post graduation. First at Class 10^th to decide the subject stream, second time after class 12^th  for selecting courses and third time after Graduation either for choosing a job or choosing a post graduation courses. Though decision at each stage is critical but if someone fails to choose right stream after 10^th, he/she will end up making wrong choices thereafter. 

The core issue in the process of career selection is to be more concerned about career path without deciding or thinking much on Career destination. Students after 10^th ask same question to teachers/parents/experts i.e “Which Stream Shall I choose after 10^th – Medical, Non-Medical, Humanities or Commerce?”  Sometimes even parents also seek answer for the same question. Asking question about career path is like someone on a crossroads asking you “Shall I go right, left or straight?” Will you answer this question? Before answering this question you must be asking him “where you want to go?” because before suggesting path we shall know the destination. If that fellow himself is not sure about destination and insisting you to tell the path without revealing the destination. You will surely find this irrational. Similarly suggesting career path (streams) to these young ones without knowing their career destination. To understand it better let’s see the example 

Career Destination – is deciding on to become Finance Manager

Career Path – Is to choose Commerce stream to reach your Career Destination

Career Milestones – are graduation, post graduation, entrance tests.

“Selecting a right Career Path is important which is only possible if you know where to go i.e Career Destination”

2.

Differentiating Genuine Interest, Infatuation & Ability  

Identifying genuine Interest in career and differentiating it from infatuation towards a career  must be done while making career selection. Sometimes even if a student reflects surety about getting in to a career, it’s difficult to differentiate his interest from his ability. It can be infatuation towards a specific career due to some obvious reasons like power, fame, money, ease of getting success in that particular career. It’s natural to get infatuated towards some fancy careers based on some unrealistic assumption. There is nothing wrong with this if infatuation triggers  an individual to put efforts to get close to that career. If someone is able to transform his desire into his actions to reach to the destination, infatuation converts into genuine interest. We can differentiate these factors by seeking answer to few connecting questions.

For example, If some student aspires to become a chef, firstly it’s important to know why he/she wants to become chef. A reasonable answer of this shall be followed by next question i e. " For how long he/she has been thinking seriously about becoming chef ? "

The further connecting question shall derive information about student’s efforts by asking question like  "Do you Cook? Which all recipes you make ? What do you do to learn cooking?"

If student hasn’t done anything significant in last 3 yrs in learning, reading or experiencing cooking, it’s just an Infatuation.  

But if he/she has started cooking (regardless to what they cook) or started assisting mother in cooking or started following few Chefs through blogs. Youtube, TV channel, this shows they student has genuine interest in becoming Chef. 

When you identified genuine interest, now next step is to identify ability required to be successful in area of interest. Ability is to have some inborn traits or skill set to perform that work efficiently and with ease. If ability gets coupled with genuine interest then it becomes the Perfect Career Choice.

Going further with above given case study if that student with genuine interest to become Chef also possesses great sense of taste, great sense of smell, and good fine motor skills, , means he has also ability to becoming a great Chef in future.

Selecting a Career based only on Infatuation is like castle in the air.  Ability becomes foundation and genuine interest becomes support factor for building premise of a great career.

3.

Do not be the part of a herd on the basis of trends.

Most of the students opt for career based on statistics about most chosen careers. Commerce, management, law etc. streams witness enormous admissions in a specific period of years and that’s called trend.  

Trends sometimes become misleading and risky. To understand this we need to understand simple rule of economics – Law of demand & supply. Based on trends if everybody opts for engineering in current times, this will lead to a huge supply of Engineers in future. If in the time lag b/w current and future demand doesn’t increase proportionality, the price( wage/salary) of an Engineer  automatically will go down. There can be higher chances that supply would not get consumed which ultimately lead to unemployment. 

4.

Academic  performance defines Career – A Myth

Grades today have become the foundational reason of selecting a stream. If someone scores high in Science or Maths he/she must go for PCM, If not then Commerce or Humanities. PCM or PCB becomes the first choice based on favourable grades whereas humanities become the last. Till 10th students study all subjects but after 10^th they will specifically choose set of subjects to pursue higher education till graduation or post graduation. If students are not comfortable with the subject that have chosen, they will be struggling hard next five to seven year to cope up those subjects.

Research shows significant percentage of students changing their subjects in Graduation or post graduation. They shall choose career based on their Traits, Skill Sets, Personality and abilities not just reflection of grades.

5.

Be Self aware

Each one of us is unique. Everyone has his/her own interests, values and aptitudes that set up him/her apart from others. Our Personality type, interests, values, and aptitudes make us better suited for some occupations than others. Irony is most of us are not much aware of self and find it difficult to do self assessment. One of the best ways to have better view about self is to take help of Career Counsellor/Coach who will administer variety of self assessment inventories to help you have an Informed Career Choice.

Don’t let the throw of dice decide your Career. It must be done cautiously and shall be driven by approach of balancing intuition with facts.

Manish Sharma

Career Strategist

www.school2campus.com

+91 9815320232