Career…Crafting?
My students are always offered trite advice as they struggle through major life decisions, like choosing a career. The tropes alternate between, “Chase your dreams” and “Beta, you should be an engineer, cause engineers always make $$”.
Raised in an environment where teachers and parents chose most everything for you, we now ask our 16 year olds to make some pretty consequential choices equipped with “Chase your dreams”. Some of them approached me hoping for a good answer, that slippery question, “What should I do?” I think they just about threw their hands up in the air and started to walk out of my office when I said “Well, it depends”.
But it does, depend, doesn’t it. Being an engineer might be the right advice for Hiral who builds silly games on her computer in her spare time, but very poor advice for Ajay who spends all his free time doodling his thoughts. Also not all engineers are created equal, a quick story, if you allow. My student, Mayank is an engineer, like me, and like me he was offered a job by one of India’s leading IT companies, like me he turned it down to work in education (Yay!)but it also gave us a great little anecdote to illustrate this point. Now in 2005 when I was offered a job straight out of Engineering school it fetched INR 27.5K/pm and Mayank was offered the same job at INR 40K/pm, but 15 years later. At this point I asked those poor 16 year olds to do some math and calculate the rate of growth of the salary for an entry level engineer. Now, I won’t quiz you, you are too smart, or more likely you will probably stop reading. So I will say, 2.53%, the salary for an entry level engineer grew at an annual rate of 2.53%. Oops! but the price of tomatoes has grown faster in these 15 years. So is engineering just a bad job? It depends!
It is not enough for ‘Mr. It Depends’ to be right, I must also be useful. So over the past few months I have been working with students from grade 10–12 to help them craft their own career. Now much of the work we do is one-on-one with each student, but there are frameworks, ways of thinking, that they tell me might benefit everyone. So I will, over the coming weeks, enumerate the framework that we are using so that you may apply it, too.
So with the help of a very sophisticated tool, three large circles, I shall attempt to help you think through how you could make this decision.
So what does this decision depend on? Well, it depends on you, of course, what you like to do, what you are passionate about, any cause (like education) that cries out to you. It also helps if you are good at something, you could love cricket but keep getting bowled out, so playing may not be your thing, but if you are a speak or write well, Harsha Bhogle better watch out. Finally it helps to look outward too — you are a part of a large ecosystem called the economy and through an ever-changing dance of demand and supply the economy awards value (in Rs or $$) differently for different things. Knowing what those things are today or ten years down the line may encourage you to position yourself to get more $$ for a long period of time. Sounds simple enough?
If you have been reading this far then you will be glad to know that in the next few posts I will expand on each circle and help you fill something in. How should you think about each of these things? Why might they be important? Finally we will put all three together and see what we can see.
