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Challenges of career choice guidance in tech era

 As we grew up during our high school days in the 80s, the discussion on career choice was a simplistic one with 5 choices - 3 in professional career (engineering, medicine and chartered accountancy) , 1 in academic career (do a graduation in general stream to become a school or college teacher or in government services, if you get lucky) and finally an option for non academics (try to do something which can give you a survival income with not much aspiration). This may sound rude, however, the reality was closer to this in terms of categorization of individual students.

Simplicity was the hallmark of career counselling through all of 80s and most of 90s. The new millennium started changing it all. Information Technology, dot com were new words added to career counselling parlance. From around 2015-16, the new coinage of terms with a suffix of 'tech' started appearing - edtech, fintech, adtech, hrtech, and so on. And a post-covid era in India started with a madness around "Startups"; and, career choice guidance started becoming a nightmare. It already had enough dosage of confusion and with the advent of new-age career options, the confusion reached a proportion of madness for students in high school.

But is it so difficult to choose a career. For me personally, it is a focused journey of asking oneself - what is it that you will love to do round the clock, if you did not have to bother about the basic necessities of life; one that will not tire you ever even if you don't get rest, sleep or food. Once a person is able to find the purpose for which s/he wants to dedicate their life, one has identified the career that s/he must pursue. Parents can play an extremely important role here. Parents need to be a reflecting agent and not an interfering agent. Guidance based on what the child is most comfortable with can be identified by the parents and let the child realize the same.

In a hugely connected  global world, there is no dearth of opportunity; and still, we find a significant number of youth completely lost in their journey of life. Parents need to play a more defining role to enable their child. It is important to support and channelize the energy and not impose their own view on the child. Simple to say this, but quite difficult to implement. Parenthood does call for significant sacrifice of personal time, especially during the growing up time of kids. Balancing one's own career aspirations and supporting the career choice of their own son or daughter is a tricky balance where the outcome gets manifested only after a decade or so of the action taken by you. This makes it even more challenging.

My personal experience of raising a child has made me realize the importance of observing the child and enabling their own interest area. You may even have to invest time and other resources   to nurture certain interest through repeated exposure. This can lead to building up of the right attitude and aptitude for the career path that the child may imbibe and follow through. It is important to understand that this is not imposing a career choice but enabling one.

Challenges of career choice guidance can be fun, if enough efforts are made to understand the uniqueness of each child and not follow a templatized format. 

Your views and comments are welcome.

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