How is a career guidance expert helpful? Is career guidance really important? Who needs a career guidance expert? Why do people make career switches and change jobs? What are the factors that affect their search for a new job?
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Where can one avail career consulting services? Who’s the best career guidance expert in India? These are persisting questions in numerous minds. Yours included, maybe. Well, here we give the answers.
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Yes, career guidance is both helpful and important! Career planning and student counseling,provided by career guidance experts all over the world,is an extremely broad and a comprehensive concept. Access to career consulting services is particularly limitedin India specifically owing to one primary reason -lack of awareness & resulting apathy.
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What further emaciates possibilities is the fact that, most providers of career consulting services in India are inadequately & inappropriately trained or qualified in India. Also, oftentimes, career consulting services fail to develop an individual’s long-term career management skills, and focus upon immediate turnarounds. Know this: there is no shortcut to brilliance.
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“We are clearly still wasting talent on a scale which is scandalous. It is a moral failure, an affront against social justice which we have to put right.”
The Rt. Hon. Michael Gove, June 2010 (appointed Minister for the Cabinet Office, UK on 13 February 2020)
Topics covered
There’s more than one way to reach the right job
Understanding The Significance of A Career Guidance Expert
Career guidance experts are skillful paraprofessionals, some even doctoral-level practitioners. They are trained educators engaged inexercising scientific & experiential psychological assessment tools to better gauge a child’s mind.
This is done with an objective particularly to encourage & developconsciousness towards children’s own self to finally settle their professional goals in life (explore themselves, recognize personal strengths & finally select potential career areas).
Following what Rt. Hon. Gove (in quote above) has justly mentioned, well planned & well-organized career guidance services are increasingly important to serve as a link between industry & academia. Services in this space are exceptionally scarce and rudimentary in India.
It is vital for a child to learn & explore the many skills that are available to her at a nascent stage. This early knowledge becomes an asset to her later, for effective management of her career.
This detailed post will explain things in a bit. Firstly, let us together understand where we are standing currently and familiarize ourselves with the status quo in India. be patient through this report, so you miss no critical theories.
Why India needs Career Guidance Experts?
To confront, manage and combat the Great Indian Talent Conundrum(GITC) and build the most competitive knowledge-based economy and society in the world
Huh? What’s GITC?
According to astudy done by Korn Ferry(an organisational consulting firm), India is expected to have a talent deficit of 85.2 million workers by 2030. This will be most visible in the financial services, technology, media, and telecommunications sectors.
The samestudy said that India is also projected to have a skilled labour surplus of 245.3 million workers by 2030.
Foremost Talent Assessment& SolutionsCompany in India, PeopleStrong’s India Skills Report and CII (Confederation of Indian Industry) refer to this as GITC or the Great Indian Talent Conundrum.
Status quo,in India, is as explained in the following pointers.
- Nowadays, industries have become more demanding and profit-oriented. They are bent towards hiring only experienced professionals. Companiesmostly refrain from providingin-house training to freshmen. So, this actually means that fresh recruits nowadays should be skilled rather than qualified.
Moreover, India’s rural youth lacks the cultural capital (see conclusions for links), access to information and the urban medium of instruction/ interaction. It varies a great deal from the country’s urban youth.
- Not to mention, the urban youth is similarly misguided, mismanaged and deprived of long-term benefits due to the unavailability of career consulting services in the country.
- The urban students even face a major problem in effective communication, let alone their rural counterparts who feel completely at a loss.
This affects their performance in continuation of education and their long-term career. Career guidance should be a quintessential element in the minds of Indian policy-makers of today.
- A CRISIL Foundation(a market intelligence company, formerly under McGraw Hill Financial Inc., now under S&P Global, Manhattan, New York City) study points out, rather disturbingly, that although engineer turnout from institutes in India will almost double in the next 5 years– from 0.65 million to 1.3 million engineers, their employability will diminish further.
- NASSCOM(a trade association of Indian IT and BPO companies) further adds that, every year only 10-15% out of over 3 million regular graduates/ postgraduates are considered employable by the Industry.
In India, students, even after completing their post-graduation, are not considered fit for jobs, while they are expected to be employable rather than just qualified. These qualified students lack the skills, which in today’s fast-growing industries and companies are hunting for.
Apart from graduates from the elite IIMs, IITs and a handful of other similar top institutes, the rest struggle to place their students. India’s labour productivity is $10,080 a year, compared with $23,888 in Brazil and $107,551 in the US, according to our Labour Ministry.
In India, we are making a cardinal blunder. Closing these skill gaps of our qualified workforce is critical for India. A young population is India’s demographic dividend.It gives India all the more potential.
India.inc, which refers to the formal (comprising government and corporate) sector of the nation (this only includes people employed by a company both non-govt & govt. companies), involves only 7-10% of the total workforce in India and contributes more than half of the country’s GDP. This is a significant misuse of India’s demographic dividend.
Skill is not only required to use computers but also to till the land.
This entire situation of GITC (Great Indian Talent Conundrum) needs to be levitated,which again dovetails into the fact that career guidance and career consulting services must make an obligatory part of India’smacroeconomic policies, infrastructure, and concerted action.
A Clarion Call for Students – In Focus
Young people are confronting an increasingly competitive employment market.
In India, not only is the gap between industry and academia huge, it is increasing annually.
- Choice has become an important part of the education system today. As elaborated in the paragraphs above, it is extremely crucial to map available talents to the industries that need them.
- Career consulting servicesby experienced & adequately equipped career guidance experts gives all students, from all backgrounds,the freedom & opportunity to pursue disciplines which best suit their aspirations and talents.
- It is critical that these young people as well as their guardians are sufficiently informed about the potential of life-changing career decisions, and the positive ways they can influence their future working lives.
- And in the process, helping students to acquire the knowledge, strengths and attitudes enabling them to take advantage of the opportunities and liberties that solid education brings, and helps shape personalcapacities to make contributions to the society positively.
For this to happen, students & guardians need good career education, information, advice and guidance (CEIAG)
CEIAG empowers recipients – of all abilities, interests and ambitions – with the knowledge and understanding they need, to progress into higher education or sustainable employment. [CEIAG: Product Reference – DFE-00550-2010, Open Government Licence of UK]
The role of a career guidance expert working with early youth
A career guidance expert must be free from institutional bias, provide young people with impartial CEIAG that challenges preconceptions and stereotypes, values both academic and vocational routes and must be informed by the labour market (i.e. must be adequately enlightened about labour/ job market dynamics).
This helps recipients of their services to:
| • Choose qualification routes that are suitable for them |
| • Meet their aspirations for further and higher education, work-based learning and professional establishment of self |
| • Make decisions that enable them to achieve education to the highest possible level |
A career guidance expert contributes to one’s preparation for and understanding of the world of work by helping her to
| • Access personalized local, national and international education ecosystem information |
| • Understand the opportunities within a dynamic education space |
| • Understand the demands and requirements of particular occupations/ industries |
| • Understand the attributes and values required for future working life |
| • Gain supreme actionable knowledge of career and educational opportunities provided by industry experts with decades of experience (personalized human intervention & delivery) |
A career guidance expert supports all to progress, prosper and:
| • Plan, manage and develop their careers |
| • Develop a strong sense of personal responsibility and the resilience to overcome barriers to achieve their goals |
| • Broaden respective horizons, raise aspirations and appreciate their potential to progress |
| • Understand the benefits of further and higher education |
| • Gain access to wider networks, which increase their understanding of career routes and the knowledge and skills they need to succeed |
At Which Stages Can basic Career Guidance and Counselling? Be Offered?
At all stages, everywhere!
Further Into Context: What are the Essential Characteristics of the Best Career Guidance Experts?
The following sections seek to discuss the key deliverables& components of ideal & best career guidance experts, including the counselling process, associated offerings, psychometric career & needs assessments, corporate tie-ups, statistics and more.
The basis of any counselling activity is career assessments. Career assessments help provide a realistic evaluation of a test taker’s abilities and strengths.
- There are several subsequent elements to a successful counseling exercise to complete the holistic evaluation of atest-taker, relating to their daily schedule, work-style, motivating factors, academic standing, and more for the attainment of a valid career decision taking into account the student’s suitability for the particular career.
- Such an evaluation helps the test-taker gain an unbiased and accurate insight into oneself.
- Assessments also aid counsellors’(Careers Profession Expert’s) understanding of the test-taker’s core set of abilities, unique traits and factors which are responsible for influencing the ultimate career choice, long-term stability &satisfaction.
Key Attributes of ideal career & needs assessment psychometric tests:
Ideal Career & Needs Assessment Psychometric Tests should be modelled on established theories with defined &quantifiable parameters (determinants) which are tested & re-tested over a large sample size as well as overtime. For example, iDC’s Career Assessment Framework has been tested over a very large number of participants.
If these tests are administered otherwise, without their relevance – reliability – validity being scored, it may be dangerous as well as ethically & legally not acceptable.
For example, say a child, after being tested with an under-rated psychometric analysis, is recommended educational & future career pathways/ action plans according to the test results.
After a couple of years,if she is diagnosed with chronic Boufféedélirante (French term for acute & transient psychotic disorders) or something similar, the career counselling expert who used the analysis can be sued for gross negligence, data secrecy or statistical inadequacy etc. amounting to lakhs of rupees.
iDC’s assessment (in following figure) is based on at least 3 dimensions (A, B, C below) of a test taker.
- Aptitudes: modeled on the lines of Cattel-Horn-Carroll’s (CHC) Theory of 3-stratum structure of intelligence [Stratum I: narrow abilities, Stratum II: broad ability, and Stratum III: consisting of a single ‘general ability’]
- CHC theory is narrowed down to Verbal Aptitude, Numerical Aptitude, Reasoning Aptitude, Spatial, and Mechanical Aptitude
- Personality: modeled on the lines of Five Factor Model (FFM) as developed by Costa and Mc Crae, also well known as the “Big Five Factor Model” or the “OCEAN Model”
- FFM theory’s 5 verticals are Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism
- Interest: based upon the Holland’s theory of Vocations
- This theory classifies individuals based upon 6 basic interest types: Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising and Conventional
An Ideal Career Suggestion Mechanism Must Pass Through a Career Fitment Analytics System Explained Above
Every test taker may be suggested 5 or more top career choices based upon her scores in each of the dimensional assessments. This represents how each dimension type corresponds to different career fields.
Test-takers should also receive suggestions corresponding to their scores in two of the dimensions taken together at a time.
Finally, the report should also highlight the overall fitment to broad career clusters with respect to all 3 dimensions taken together.
An ideal Career Assessment Report should have a 3-pronged suggestion concept:
- Best suited career clusters with respect to each dimension
- Best suited career clusters with respect to 2 dimensions taken at a time
- Best suited broad career clusters with respect to all 3 dimensions taken together
There is a Chinese curse which says “May you live in interesting times.” Like it or not, we live in interesting times. They are times of danger and uncertainty, but they are also the most creative of any time in the history of mankind.
Robert F. Kennedy
Ideal Career guidance experts must be compliant to UNESCO’s career guidance & orientation structural paradigm
Being the best Career Guidance Expert in India: Parameters Defining Expertise of a taskforce
Career guidance experts must provide young minds with a full-stack career solution that comprises:
- Career directories in multiple languages (iDC accommodates 6 languages)
- Reliable +validpsychometric career & needs assessment tools
- Group/one-on-one counseling
- Application pathways for colleges
- Vocational career options
- Plausible scholarship management/ financing
Component ‘A’: A Career Guidance Expert, enabler & solutions provider must work with young minds through their School & College
Sub-parameters:
#1 As a Career Guidance Expert, you must use computer-aided guidance packages, skills assessment tools, psychometric tests and personal inventories
#2 Interview clients on a one to one basis, both actively & passively (in the presence of guardians/parents)
#3 Carry out a needs assessment
#4 Elaborate specialist, expert & current actionable knowledge of career and educational opportunities provided by industry experts with decades of experience (personalized human intervention & delivery)
#5 Provide access to personalized local, national and international education ecosystem information
#6 Elaborate opportunities subjectively for every individual within a dynamic education space
#7 Elaborate requirements and demands of particular suggested occupations
#8 Elaborate attributes and values required for a future working life
#9 Provide 360o information across all dimensions, advice + guidance about careers, education, employment and training
#10 Help to apply for further and higher education, as well as work-based training and other employment opportunities, on a case-to-case basis
#11 Assist to draw up action-oriented developmental plans & charting a strategy path for education &training,employment and supporting them to achieve these goals
#12 Assist with scholarship management of awardees
#13Support the transition of young people with learning difficulties and disabilities, and provide feasible solutions to those needing specialist education
#14 Espouse every individual subjectively with:
- Orientation & report understanding sessions
- Institute short-listing
- Dedicated planners
- A career directory for exhaustive information on careers (iDC offers 1057 hours of contentin 6 languages)
- Thoroughly researched & updated online posts (blogs)
- Weekly awareness newsletters
- Regular career updates (exam dates, notifications, entrance exams)
Component ‘B’: A Career Guidance Expert, enabler & solutions provider must build an exhaustive local, national and international education ecosystem of information
Being the best career guidance expert essentially demands the artillery of a thorough, comprehensive & exhaustive education ecosystem information directory.
Globally, there are more than 20,000 career pathways, career specialisation tracks, and occupational roles that may be relevant for a school student of today.
Amalgamating all in one directory in one place and most importantly linking all careers to the academic programs available in a country, is of utmost importance for being the best career guidance expert.
So, alternatively, a career guidance expert’s artillery must have separate career & college directories that are linked to each other.
An ideal career guidance expert holds the responsibility of helping a child’s mind make sense of how to reach up to a certain recommended career or job in future.
So, telling her that you will be best for such and such career will not make sense unless she is able to find her way through the academic programs she may have to pursue in order to reach that certain recommended career or job.
Sub-parameter 1: Building a Career inventory
#1 Content must be benchmarked internationally.
#2 Extensive research on jobs in different industries.
#3 Quantifiable research parameters – and each segment of the entire content load must be validated with the international benchmark.
#4 Interpretative analysis of research data to find out commonalities.
Sub-parameter 2: Building a College inventory
Academic programs/courses across national and international universities, colleges, vocational institutions, and skill training institutions must be linked in multiple layers with an ideal Career Directory as explained above.
Component ‘C’: A Career Guidance Expert, enabler & solutions provider must ‘train the trainers’ to skill/ re-skill/ up-skill new facilitators
This component deals with the expansion of on-ground facilitators, career counselors and provider task force through certification training & subsequent job-shadowing for incumbents (an ideal career guidance expert must regularly&responsibly train new counselors &advisors)
Sub-parameters:
#1 Impart routine multi-Level certification/ training (blended, offline & online classroom format) to new providers/ facilitators for induction into the system and subsequent handholding
#2 Job-shadowing opportunities to incumbents (imminent to personal training):
#3 Run small group sessions or larger presentations on all aspects of career work
#4 Keep up to date with labour market information, legislation, and professional and academic developments
#5 Participate in careers conventions and fairs
#6 Manage& use retrospectively (for training purposes) a detailed exhaustive inventory/ caseload of clients
Component ‘D’: A Career Guidance Expert, enabler & solutions provider must build a reliable + valid career ASSESSMENT system
The base of any counselling activity is career assessments. Career assessments help provide a realistic evaluation of a test-taker’s abilities and strengths.
Ideal Career & Needs Assessment Psychometric Tests should be modelled to established theories with defined & quantifiable parameters (determinants) which are tested & re-tested over a large sample size as well as over time. iDC’s Analytics Framework has been tested over a very, very large number of participants in India.
If these tests are administered otherwise, without their relevance – reliability – validity being scored, it may be dangerous as well as ethically & legally not acceptable.
The most common standard reliability statistic in use today is Cronbach’s alpha.
The Reliability Coefficients (Cronbach’s Alpha) for iDC’s individual dimensional assessments are:
- Aptitudes –0.84
- Personality – 0.79
- Interest – 0.78
Reliability coefficients typically measure how closely related the items tested are to the model/ theory used. The general rule of thumb is that a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.70 and above is good, higher is even better. To know the models/ theories used by us, understand a template report before enrolling.
For an example, say a child, after being tested with an under-rated psychometric analysis, is recommended educational & future career pathways/ action plans according to the test results.
After a couple of years, she is diagnosed with chronic Bouffée délirante (French term for acute & transient psychotic disorders) or something similar, the company can be sued for gross negligence, data secrecy, statistical inadequacy etc.
What Makes IDC The Best & The Most Appreciated Career Guidance Expert?
Answer: iDC’s patrons & corporate connoisseurs!
iDreamCareer (iDC) is India’s largest UNBIASED career counselling venture in India working with
- 2.5 million students every year
- Private Schools, Non-Profits, Governments and CSRs
- Innovative & enlightened establishments including Shiv Nadar Foundation, The Shri Ram School, Navy Schools, Sunbeam Group, Maharaja Sawai Man Singh, Indian School Muscat, Kunskapsskolan, Orchid International group & others
- Non-Profits/ NGOs/ Foundations
- Miracle Foundation
- Magic Bus
- Literacy India
- MakkalaJagriti
- Antarang Foundation
- Udyan Care
- Udyan Care
- Baale Mane
- CSR sector/Corporates
- Raman Kant Munjal Foundation
- HeroFincorp
- DS Group
- Bharti Foundation
- Uber
- 73,000+ schools across India & the Middle East
- 12 state governments including Delhi, Andhra Pradesh, Haryana, Rajasthan, Karnataka amongst others
- Various International Agencies such as UNDP, UNICEF, Central Square Foundation, Michael & Susan Dell Foundation
iDC was recently selected as one of the World’s top 200 EdTech companies by Arizona State University & GSV Ventures for GSV Cup to be held at their summit in San Diego, USA.
iDC student subscribers received scholarships from the Hero group and are currently enrolled in colleges like:
- Loyala College Chennai
- St Xavier’s Kolkata
- Christ University Mumbai
- IIM Indore
- SRCC Delhi
- LSR Delhi
- Shaheed Sukhdev College of Business Studies Delhi
- Banaras Hindu University
iDC has robust artillery:
- The Career Directory contains detailed information on 550+ career pathways which include 2100+ specialisation tracks and 12000+ occupational roles.
- No of total colleges: 23,000+ (India: 22,000+) No of Countries: 15+
- Professional colleges: 6,000+
- Vocational colleges: 17,000+
- No of total academic programs: 2,90,000+
- No of total entrance exams: 1200+
- No of total scholarships / fellowships: 1200+
iDC, as a Career Guidance Expert trainer,also boasts a panel of 1079 certified career counsellors spread-out across over 150 districts of India.
Best Career Guidance Expert in India: Final Thoughts & Conclusions
We’ve presented assertions and analyses in putting forward the reality of how to be the best career guidance expert in the education sector.
Career consulting services &the full-stack solutions of iDC have created an enormous footprint & have directly impacted the lives of close to 5 million students!
iDC’s expansive innovative & immersive tech-enabled platform, statistically reliable subjective assessment tests, &the comprehensively trained task force of Occupations Research professionals & career counselors bring to students CEIAG (Careers Education, Information, Advice and Guidance) programs using a partnership between notable industry stalwarts & leviathans.
Understanding the intricacies of any career is not child’s play. It requires experiential assessment of competencies (skills, abilities, knowledge & a lot more). So, CEIAG is an indispensable tool for all young minds and we are India’s leading CEIAG provider. iDC is also India’s foremost test administrator in career design. iDC aspires to reach every state and every child in India!
Must Check:
- India Outlook FY20 – CRISIL Research
- Skilling India: The Billion People Challenge – CRISIL Centre for Economic Research
- PeopleStrong’s India Skills Report – 2020
- The Great Indian Talent Conundrum – Countercurrents.org
- CEIAG Online Community Resources – Official Portal: [Product Reference – DFE-00550-2010, Open Government Licence of UK]
- National Archives – Government of UK
- What is Cultural Capital?
- Study by PricewaterhouseCoopers– PDF
- STEMNET (Top 10 Employability skills) – PDF
- White Paper by Indo Universal Collaboration for Engineering(IUCEE) – PDF
- Employability Skills–SkillsYouNeed
To put those nagging doubts to rest:
- Why do students need CEIAG?
- Be the torchbearer
- School vs Coaching Institutes
- Career Guidance for 9th& 10th
- Career Guidance for 11th& 12th
- Career Guidance After Graduation
- How to make right career choices?
- 51 top universities in India
With a Master’s in Biophysics-Biostatistics, Sreenanda acquired professional experience in computational proteomics of human molecules. She is currently working with the Research and Data Team at iDreamCareer.
