Comment

Gone are the days when the sought-after career choices were restricted to the traditional fields of medicine and engineering. Today, the next generation has wide-ranging lucrative choices such as animation, bioinformatics, ceramic engineering, cyber law, intellectual property rights law, knowledge process outsourcing, gemology, leather technology, and retail and medical transcription.

Though the emerging favourites seem to be biotechnology, hospitality and the evergreen management streams, aviation engineering and the pure sciences are among the options. Also, two Ts have come up on top: technology in urban areas and teaching in rural areas.

Choosing a career involves some core elements of testing, guidance, coaching and planning. In current times, planning a career can be a fairly scientific and sequential process.

Aptitude tests help in gauging the natural abilities and interest of students. If enough importance is given to these findings while selecting a professional stream, it can result in a rewarding and satisfying career.

These tests are quite easily admissible and categorise students according to their personalities (extrovert or introvert) and their natural tendencies in areas of spatial, numerical, reasoning, verbal and mechanical abilities. These reports help in suggesting if the chosen career should be in the broad areas of technology, aesthetics, mass media, education, outdoors, law, science, medicine etc.

Proper guidance and coaching can then be sought in order to come out in flying colours in entrance examinations like Gujcet, CAT, GSPC, AIEEE, SAT, GMAT, GRE, Toefl etc.

Several classes teach students how to make high-impact resumes, practise dry runs on several topics for group discussions, interview formats and likely questions asked in tests of communication and soft skills.

It may also be necessary to go through a test to ascertain one’s entrepreneur quotient, in order to plan on obtaining relevant experience before starting a new business or enterprise.

With study loans available at competitive rates of interest, it is easy to make a financial assessment full-term professional courses as well as the repayment schedule. In case of a degree from a foreign institute, appropriate financial planning may be mandatory.
A mental preparedness to handle disappointment in terms of not obtaining a seat in a chosen field or admission in your first choice of college is necessary.

The maxim ‘the harder you fall, the higher you bounce’ will make the transition from a school student’s life to that of a professional student’s life easier.

Planning a career, as distinct from a job, can span one’s lifetime. While age has a certain connotation of biological years or number of years of education, determining one’s career age can be quite innovative. One can apply the zero career date to the first day of service or to the first day when one quits and starts a chosen path.

As an illustration, a student having completed a PhD in chemistry can cross over and study the Japanese language, go on to pursue a job as a translator and Japanese technical writing. In such a case, the years of specialisation in chemistry are replaced by a zero career date as the first day as a foreign language translator.