Dheya In News: Guiding Light

The Telegraph – Career Graph – Hemachaya De – 3rd Dec 09

Pramit Mukherjee loved physics and wanted to become an astrophysicist. That was until he took an online career assessment test.

Of course, he still loves the subject, but this 15-year-old student of South Point High School in Calcutta now knows that he will do best as an entrepreneur.

Mukherjee was chivvied into taking the test by his parents who felt that his academic performance was not satisfactory.

They realised he needed to be clear about whether he had an aptitude for basic sciences.

Not surprisingly, the test brought about a sea change in the boy's manner of thinking. He learnt that he needed to assess his strengths and weaknesses before setting his career goals. "The programme helped me realise that I can think independently and that I should concentrate on becoming an entrepreneur," says Mukherjee. "I may not take science in Plus Two as planned earlier."

Abishek Datta, a Class XII student of another city school, is also a lot more confident after taking the test. "I am studying commerce. But I was never quite sure that I would do well in finance," he says. His online assessment test results, coupled with one-on-one career counselling, have shown that he would be much better off if he took up BBA (bachelor of business administration) after school and followed it up with an MBA.

Mukherjee and Datta are not alone. A whopping 98 per cent of boys and 96 per cent of girls in India are estimated to experience difficulty in making career decisions at the school and college levels.



Only 4 per cent of students receives some sort of expert guidance in this regard. Sometimes career choices are based simply on market demands without taking into consideration whether or not one's skills and personality suit the profession one is opting for. This is where career assessment programmes like Aavishkar hope to make a difference.

The first-of-its-kind online career assessment programme is helping hundreds of students choose the best suited career. The programme has been launched by Pune-based career guidance portal dheya.com in association with the Bengali daily Ananda Bazar Patrika.

Targeted at students aged between 13 and 26 years, Aavishkar has been designed by career experts and social scientists on the basis of psychometrics, mind exercises, simulations and questions to enable students realise their potential. "I have travelled across the world. In most developed countries, much emphasis is laid on career guidance for school students. In India, however, it's a neglected area. This is one of the reasons a large number of students do not opt for higher education," says Anand Desai, director of dheya.com. "In our country, only 12 out of 100 eligible heads enroll in colleges. According to the government, this needs to be raised to at least 60 to make the nation more productive.

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Career experts also feel that such as- sessments should be made a mandatory part of the school curriculum. "Parents should be involved in these events because most often they are the ones who cause most often they are the ones who finance the children's education," says Salony Priya, a counselling psychologist who is part of the counselling teams in schools such as the Heritage School and DPS, Megacity.

Priya suggests that schools set up permanent notice boards on the premises disseminating career information for students. "I deal with hundreds of cases where students are depressed because they have taken up subject combinations for which they have no aptitude.

And also because parents exert pressure on them to follow conventional career paths such as medicine and engineering," she says.

However, academicians would like to put in a word of caution; they warn against bulldozing students into choosing a particular career path. "Perspectives change with age. And students should give themselves room to accommodate those changes. So although career assessment tests are welcome at an early stage, they should be done in a responsible manner.

We shouldn't straitjacket students into a particular mode of thinking," says Devi Kar, principal of Modern High School who is also a member of a central panel on school reforms.

So if you need some advice on which path to follow after school or college, you know which way to go.