When I was of the age of 12-13 years old, I had no idea what kind of career options are available to students. I just knew 3-4 fields in which I could explore. One was engineering, others were being a doctor, CA or doing IAS. I knew no other career options. Out of my interest in maths and technical things alike, I chose engineering and gave 4 years of mine to the field. When I look backwards, I feel that I could have opted for some other career stream as well that could have been more helpful in my current career of starting Craft Driven. I believe this is not only my story; I have met many people who have experienced the same thing. One of my friend who did medical science is now a food blogger. Another friend of mine who started preparing for IAS left it in between and started his own firm in providing legal information to companies. These stories can never end.
Currently in our country, there are around 2.9 million students who are giving exams of 10th, 12th, graduating or doing higher education. Accessibility to career counselling is the need of hour for them yet only 5% of these actually receive professional career counselling. Having talked to one of the career counsellor, I was astonished to know that 75% of students are mainly influenced by their parental pressures. Even today, parents try to fulfil their unachieved dreams through their kids and give them guidance based on their own experience instead of taking professional help. 20% of students have access to no guidance while only 5% of students receive professional career counselling since their parents are aware and support taking guidance from an expert.
Even after 69 years of independence, we have high number of drop-outs at elementary level. The combined percentage is close to 40% which marks a question to how aware is today’s generation. Maximum number of students are from small towns and villages and not all these students drop out due to poverty, many drop out because of lack of interest. We need to understand that career counselling is not limited to providing information on different careers but it can support students to understand the importance of education and can create awareness of different policies undertaken by government to support needy students. However, apart from certain initiatives by NGOs, they have no access to career counselling. The situation persists even when many NGOs provide this service free of cost, and several companies are covering this initiative under their CSR project. Even the government has now started National Counselling Services for students and job seekers which answers many questions related to career. It is to be noted that career counselling in today’s world is not a costly affair. The only necessity is to make students and their parents aware of the need of career counselling. The demand of the hour is to makestudents aware of the opportunities they have in their respective fields.
The situation is better in urban areas with many schools providing expert services to their students through career counsellors, but still it has not reached to the whole population of students. Even today, parents and teachers push their children based on their own knowledge. This is the time when we need to highlight students’ talent and providing each and every student an opportunity to excel in their field. Lack of career counselling to these students does not only impact the students’ lives but also affect our nation’s in terms of loss of talent.
