Our ever-versatile leader, Eesha Bagga, Director at Mindler, has been awarded the Young Woman Entrepreneur of the Year by the prestigious Business World Women Entrepreneurship Summit & Awards 2021 & BW disrupt. Eesha is a people’s person who brings to the table a diverse set of skills and experience in business and coaching. An alumna of the University of Delhi and IIM Lucknow, she has also pursued her Life Coaching from International Coaching Federation. At Mindler, she heads Partnerships and Alliances and is absorbed with creating and implementing strategies that help increase brand awareness, create alliances, and acquire new business.
As the world has evolved, so have the options of careers, students can aim for. Gone are the days when our education system was confined to a handful of career domains. Students today have the freedom to choose from hundreds of career choices. While this is certainly a boon for our education system, it does come with its caveat i.e. the need for the right career counselling systems, and how to implement them in a streamlined manner.
While the need for education counselling systems is quite evident, the implementation of the same often becomes difficult, due to the various challenges the industry poses. Let us look at a few of those concerns and discuss how we can implement an improved system efficiency.
1. Reluctance from Key Stakeholders
The world of careers may have evolved exponentially but the decision-makers and the stakeholders in the space are still not aware of the emerging possibilities. This lack of awareness often makes them limit students to exploring only a handful of popular career domains. These limitations are often seen in the form of reluctance to consult a career counsellor, pursuing career paths based on hearsay or past success stories; and students often end up missing out on potential opportunities to identify their best-fit career paths.
2. The change from Old to New Systems
The need for proper education counselling isn’t something that has gone unnoticed, but instead, one that has now been recognised by the New Education Policy as well. What is lacking however is the use of the modern-day, current, and relevant counselling tools. A comprehensive and reliable psychometric assessment, tools, and frameworks to focus on profile building, exposure to virtual internships and skill-building opportunities, and access to databases of colleges, exams, and scholarships; can all be had under one platform today. Making this transition to technology-driven career decision-making platforms can enable us in creating a sustainable career guidance ecosystem for students.
3. Hesitance to embrace technology
Career guidance through technology-led tools can be extremely powerful as it can reduce bias in the decision-making process and enable personalization. Stakeholders in the past have been reluctant to embrace technology but the pandemic has managed to push a massive change on this front. The willingness to accept technology and make it a part of the education curriculum is now a reality. The fact that hybrid learning is the future is now a well-accepted fact and it opens an amazing opportunity to implement comprehensive career guidance solutions for students.
4. Bridging the skill gap among Educators
With a large portion of our schools lacking a career guidance system, there are at least 1.5 million career coaches that are needed in our country. If our teachers are trained on the kind of career opportunities that emerge from the core subjects they teach, they can contribute in a massive way by increasing awareness about various career pathways amongst students. Currently, this is a big gap in our system. Training and upskilling the educators through simple certification programs on career guidance can be a blessing for the students in the system, and a solution that can have a lasting impact on the future as well.
While the challenges may be more, what we should be focusing on are the solutions. Tech-based solutions and tech-based counselling systems integrated with quality guidance from educators and career coaches can enable every institution to have a proper counselling ecosystem that can be implemented in a streamlined manner. This is not a short-term change we are aiming for, but one that needs to last in the future as well. We have had the answer all along, all we need is the proper tool to implement it and see the impact it can make.