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Tips for career planning: Be proactive and futuristic- 15-Jul-2015
Forced by parental and other compulsions, more often than not, most of the students choose the most popular streams like medical and engineering. Or a subject that is popular at the present time, which turns out to be a matter of regret later when you have completed your higher studies and staring at the bizarre career world.
Due to parental pressure, uninformed advice and lack of awareness about career opportunities, you may choose a course that is currently popular among the flock, sidelining your own interests. This is a commonplace phenomenon. Due to this mistake, most of the graduates end up in industries that are different from their line of studies. Even if they do get a job that matches their graduation, they do not feel happy about this job and growth. This article is about how to tackle this career problem, well in advance, when you choose your course and institution on completion of Class 12.
Career planning can start anytime, the earlier the better, so that you have ample time to prepare yourself. Before choosing the career, you need to understand yourself, your skills, interests, strengths and weaknesses. There are also ways to find out where your real interests lie, whether it is in art and design, dance or drama, community development, poverty alleviation, photo-journalism, graphic design or a more specific field. You can take up online free tests to find out which field of study or line of work really interests you, or even meet a career counsellor for that matter. Get into the deeps and find out as specific as possible the work that you wish to do.
After choosing the specific career, everything else falls in line. But before choosing a career, certain things need to be considered. While you will happily work your passion, it also needs to give you enough pay to sustain your living. To ensure this, you need to be proactive and futuristic in your approach.
Lets say today you are choosing your course. It will consume at least five years to complete your studies and enter an industry. It will take at least five years to gain good grounds in that industry and that is the time which will be the prime time of your career. At that time, the industry you have chosen needs to be safe and sound.
But how will you know which industry will be sound 10 years from now when you are choosing your course or career? Thats why you need to be careful while choosing a career as you will have to ensure the industry you choose will be doing good 10 years from now. For that, keep tacking the career opportunities and read forecasts which will help you choose emerging fields. A majority of the highest-paying jobs of today did not even exist five years ago. For example, the online social media.
It is the times when careers are becoming complicated as a convergence of fields are witnessed. For example, biology and technology has combined to become biotechnology. Seek the help of the internet to learn more about the rare and special jobs that are emerging. After choosing the career, however, the choice of course and college becomes easy. Again the Internet can be consulted to find out the best universities offering the specialised course. To sum up, the student of today has to be highly proactive as the career world has become competitive and career planning and preparations should be started as early as possible. Most importantly, aim to be rare and special!
