In our society Career planning is not considered as important as it should be. Many students make career choices based on the most picked-up career options like Engineering, Doctor, Police, and Teacher etc. Students are usually not sure what they want to become in life and what is their interest area for their career. A recent study showed that 1 in 3 students are unhappy with the course that they picked and almost 4 out of 5 working professional are not satisfied with their jobs which leads to unhappy employee or less productive human resources.
We found that most of the students and teachers are not aware about various popular career options, what are minimum qualifications, institutes, what to do after 10th & 12th and growth opportunities in each sectors etc. The root cause of this problem is lack of career awareness & availability of various careers options in easy to understandable format.
This is increasing un-employability among literate youth and also negatively impacting productivity of our country.
PURE India Trust has worked with more than 50 schools across north India and interacted with thousands of students to assess about their career aspirations and we found that most of the students are either not sure of what they want to be in future or they have very limited choice of career option e.g. Teaching, defense, Railway, Doctor, Engineer or police etc only. Moreover they are not aware of the steps or actions to be taken to become a doctor, engineer, teacher or anything else. Hence the students keep studying and complete graduation, post graduations and more than that but still they are not sure of what career they want. Thousands of students keep spending years of time in preparing for competitive exams and only 1 out of 50 get a success.
Solution : Margdarshak (Career Guidance & Mentoring Program)
To solve this issue of Un-employability we interacted with more than 2000 students and designed charts of 100 most popular careers and initiated a unique career guidance and mentoring program (Margdarshak) to create awareness about careers opportunities among students of 9th to 12th grade, Teachers and Parents.
With this program, we inspire students to start thinking about their careers in the class 9th so that they can decide right career goal based on their interest and capability. Our program is combination offline, online & over the phone Career guidance to students.
Following are the key elements of the comprehensive career mentoring programs:
1. Paste Career Chart: We have developed unique Charts of 100 most popular career options and mentioned minimum required details for each career e.g. what subject to chose after 10th class to achieve a career, Institutes types, growth opportunities, starting salary etc. We permanently paste these charts on school wall so that same are always available for all students’ reference. It will create awareness about 100 most career options among all the students and students can make a better career choice for them.
2. Career Awareness Seminar at schools: We conduct Career awareness workshop at School for the students of 9th to 12th grade. This seminar will focus on “importance of career planning” at school level and encourage students, Teachers and Parents to participate. We share emerging industry trend and practices so that students can decide career of their interest. We also invite local successful people to share their journey so that students can relate easily.
3. Career Helpline: We have established a student career Helpline where students can call and speak to a domain specific career expert / mentor over the phone and can get answer of his / her all career related queries. This helpline is available for all the students in Hindi and English currently and we take help of your employees to provide regional language support to the students around your office.
4. One-to-one Career guidance, In this session we invite 15-20 volunteers from your company who would undergo a short career mentoring workshop with us prior conducting one-to-one session at a school. On the day of seminar we take all volunteers to schools where each volunteer speak to a student for 10-15 min and encourage student to open up and share what they want to be in life. Based on their discussion volunteer provide initial level of career mentoring to a student.
5. Career Guide Book: We have published a detailed career guidance book based on 100 most popular careers mentioned in the career charts also. We provide this book for the future reference of students. Teacher and student can also scan a QR code to view a video of each career. This book will be provided to your students in regional languages or in English / Hindi as per your suggestion.
6. Pre & Post Impact assessment: Is done to assess the impact of the career program. The pre assessment is done of all the students before pasting charts on career wall and post assessment is done after 3-4 weeks of conducting Career Seminar in schools. This data is analyzed and comprehensive report is shared with our CSR partner.
7. Teacher’s career knowledge Enhancement workshop: We believe that teacher knows the most about each student hence we also conduct a separate session for school teacher to enhance their career related knowledge because teacher’s are the best person to mentor a student, provided teacher is aware about various popular careers. Hence we conduct a workshop for the teachers and give them access of online platform, our career book and videos of careers.
Impact Assessment
Career guidance is a proactive action to reduce un-employability among literate youth. We do impact
assessment at following steps:
- Before conducting Career workshop and displaying career charts at school.
- Within 2-3 weeks of conducting career awareness workshop at school.
- Quality of calls we get from students / parents / teachers at our career Helpline.
