Career Counseling
"The best way to predict the future is to create it." —Abraham Lincoln
Students often find it complicated at basic level to think what they want to do in their future or which career option they want to opt for a better future. If we ask any child regarding their career option, they mostly have three things to say either they want to become Doctor, Pilot or Engineer.
Most of the children don’t have knowledge even of subfields of what they desire to become.
Pakistan has now been in the list of students with no proper career counseling programs. Here, students can’t decide what they want to persuade in their future hence, remain confused throughout the phase of their life from academic to professional.
I find the similar problem and try to work on it for my mega project of Amal fellowship and for that I conduct some online interviews from people of diverse backgrounds related to how they opt their careers and what obstacles they had to pass through.
These are some questions I asked and got the adequate response which I'll try to summarize in a generic way.
1. Did you ever get career counseling in your school?
Most of the responses were negating as they didn't get proper career counseling in their school level while some got that but not in a proper transmittable way.
2. Who were involved in the career counseling you got?
Most of them had relatives, teachers and some got friends to help them choose their careers as they saw them growing up in the field and getting successful so they chose similar ones and begin their careers.
3. At what age should career counseling begin? (From 7-11 11-14 14-16 16-19)
The age which opted the most was 11-14 where students get some know how of the fields and career options in the market or industry level. They can better aim at age mentioned above while start their career counseling sessions earlier than that.
4. At what age you decided/will decide to opt your career option?
All of them decided in their intermediate level while one of the students who is in primary level stated to have software engineering as a career option but upon asking why she chose this field so she didn’t know properly and was of view that she thinks it is easy.
A survey has also been conducted from School Gateway on which method of career counseling should go on to make students choose their field and developing goals.
The 50% of responses were in favour of group counseling in the form of workshops while around 47% students think that they should be given practicals examples like case studies, job profiles or brochures to examine more deeply.
Career guidance can be taught as a separate course from basic levels or in the form of extra curricular activities. Several researches also showed that the young people having career plan are more likely to be productive, positive and more engaging in education. So there should be some sessions, webinars and seminars with understandable speakers and counselors.
