Something Arif, my school owner, requested specific help with was providing careers guidance to students in their final years at school. Alliance, like most other Indian APS’s runs up to 10th standard, age 16. From there, anyone who wants to study further, either at university or doing some practical qualification such as teacher training, must first complete the +2 (sixth form) at a college. Without this, their options are to find an unskilled job somewhere, or else just get married.
I remember being 16 and feeling the pressure of having to make a decision about the direction of my life. The multitude of questions rolling around ones head at that age are pretty intimidating (still are aged 23 in fact!): What’s my ambition? Do I continue to study? If so, where? And what? What do my parents want from me? What do my teachers think? What are my friends going to do? And most of all, if a make a wrong choice, can I reverse it?
Back home in Oxford, I was given advice left, right and centre from teachers, parents and friends and from there I was able to make some informed choices. I was also given practical guidance about which steps were needed to take to achieve my goals. Some students at Alliance, those with educated and aware parents, will also get this kind of guidance and support, but many will be on their own. Sadly, a great number of parents here believe that their investment in their child’s education need not go further than paying their school fees and expect the school to take full ownership of all areas of educational development. And this means that the responsibility for careers guidance falls solely upon that of the teachers.
Arif, is fully aware of this fact and was keen to run sessions with higher classes teaching them about choices available and showing them what steps they need to take now to achieve their future goals. Although certainly a noble cause, this eagerness to push careers is not entirely selfless – for Arif, students who know their goals are likely to focus harder on their studies, meaning his school results are likely to improve. Furthermore, parents who see children getting themselves into good jobs and earning money are more likely to send their other kids to the school too, or recommend it to their friends and neighbours. But none of this is a bad thing, in my opinion.
Junior Achievements
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| Zach and Shruti guiding groups of students through the JA program at Alliance |
So to kick off our careers events, back in November we ran a Junior Achievements training session with 9th and 10th standard. JA is an external service provider and international non-profit organisation which trains volunteers in a set of careers counselling sessions to share with groups of young people. The IDEX fellows were lucky to be given training as JA session leaders early on in the fellowship. More than one trainer is needed per session so we’ve been sharing each other’s human resource and helping out at different schools. Four other fellows helped me run the day at Alliance.
The main aim of JA is to get students thinking outside the box with regards to their future. Ask a group of Indian APS students what they want to be when they grow up and you’ll be pushed to hear more than 3 answers: doctor, advocate or engineer. (Funnily enough, very few say teacher!) Many of them are simply not aware of the huge array of options out there, and it is this that JA specifically looks to change. First we ask students to think not about jobs, but about industry. Name one industry and think about how many jobs are involved in it. Computer industry? Well we have designers, software engineers and factory workers who assemble the computers. Good. But thinking outsider the box there are many others involved in the process: The salesman in the shop, factory manager, the computer repair person, even the lorry driver who ships the computers from factory to shop. Within any one industry there are many more jobs that initially meet the eye. And every one is vital to the functioning of that industry. Once the students see this and then start making lists of all the industries they can think of suddenly the number of jobs out there is dramatically multiplied. It becomes easier for them to imagine themselves in specific roles rather than some kind of vague idea of being, for example, a doctor. After all, chocolate factories need tasters, right? Suddenly being an advocate isn’t quite so appealing…
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| Everyone engrossed in the chocolate factory video - a rather mouth watering example of induaty |
JA is also about getting students to look internally, to themselves, to think about what skill sets, talents, values they have which would fit with a certain job. Want to be a doctor but faint at the sight of blood? Perhaps that wouldn’t be the best-suited job after all. One girl told me she was good at singing but was too shy to become a famous singer. Okay, well what about looking after young children – they love to be sung to. Or becoming a music teacher? Or even making jingles for the radio! JA isn’t about giving people answers but about getting them to ask the right questions and look beyond the obvious. This is something that very nicely started off any careers guidance program. And we had a great response from the students at Alliance.
Parent sessions
Post JA, we ran a more job-specific session with students where Arif went through exactly what trainings were needed for actual career roles. Then we did a similar session just with the parents to get them thinking about their children’s futures as is this group that can often present the biggest obstacle to a child’s educational development.
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| A tough crowd: mothers at our careers talk. Still a very traditional community in Golconda |
A huge number of academic educational studies have shown that children whose parents take an active role in their education do better in school and beyond it and this is something both myself, and Arif, really wanted to relay back to parents of the children in our school. The most important thing was to make them realise that their child’s capacity to educationally develop does not stop as soon as they have left the school building. A child who is given a healthy and balanced diet, enough sleep, regular exercise and a space in which to study will find it far easier to concentrate at school than those who don’t, who may get ill and have to miss days or who are too tired to focus in class. The responsibility for ensuring these kinds of things must lie with the parents. A child who can concentrate and study hard will achieve good results and good results is what the parents want to see.
Arif explained this to a group of burkha-clad mothers and I then talked (with a translator) about the value of education opening up the doors to new opportunities rather than closing them. These parents will have the power to make decisions about whether their children continue to study or whether they must enter into paid work, or even marriage, as soon as they leave school so they too needed to be convinced that it is worth continuing to invest financially in their children’s education. The fact that they have already chosen to pay for the education of their son’s and daughters up to now means they do see this, we just wanted to show the real links there exist between, nurture and support at home, taking an interest and the time to help children to think about their educational development and genuine life success in the future. Arif told me that me, coming from the UK as an independent female, was a good role model for them. I have a BA and MA qualification and have had the opportunity to work abroad from this. We wanted to show the parents that with the right support and forward planning this kind of opportunity might some day be open to their children too.
Soft skills knowledge
Our plans for the next couple of months involve running sessions on tips for careers success. I wanted to introduce the idea of “soft skills” – those character traits and knowledge, such as knowing how to present themselves well in an interview, that give people a real advantage over others but which are unlikely to be taught to the kids by their own parents.
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| Sharing resources: A JA session we ran with students at another fellow's school |
Some other fellows are currently working on creating a job specific presentation and handout explaining to students what exact decisions need to be made now if they want to reach certain careers, such as those who want to become heart surgeons must choose the science option at +2 in college. I am hoping to add to this with a number of practical career advancement presentations based around teaching soft skills on subjects like ‘writing a resume’ and ‘how to tackle an interview’. The idea with this whole project again, is to create a combined set of resources the take the form of presentations, handouts and lesson plans that can be shared and taken to individual schools by the IDEX fellows and adapted to specific needs of students and staff there: Replicating and scaling.
Although it’s still a while before many students will actually have to be putting these things into practice it is never to early to make people aware of how, no matter where you are in the world, cracking these things makes a tremendous difference later on in life.
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