“Success is achieving your full potential, in doing something that gives you happiness
and a good standard of living.
But to know what is your full potential and what is it that you are most happy doing, you need to know yourself.”
A successful career is one which will answer all the three questions in the below diagram. You need to be good at something you do, which you enjoy and for which people are ready to pay you.
The problem however is that our current educational system is churning out graduates who cannot be employed. The ‘National Employability Report of Engineering Graduates-2014’, by Aspiring Minds released in January 2015 states that almost 70% of engineering graduates in India are not employable.
‘Higher Education in India: Vision 2030’, a report by Ernst & Young for the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), reveals that employability of IT graduates is 75%, manufacturing and healthcare is 55% and banking and insurance is 50% and this is a cause for worry.
As reported on the front page of The Times of India on 18th March, 2017, “More than 60% of the eight lakh engineers graduating from technical institutions across the country every year remain unemployed, according to the All India Council for Technical Education.”
Another study has highlighted that 60% of people in India are in the incorrect/wrong jobs in the private sector. In all likelihood they’ve made the wrong choice of career (e.g. engineering) or even the wrong kind of engineering.
These are staggering figures by any standards and bring to light one of the most important challenges that India faces – the gap between academics and skill development and application. We have pedigree engineers who pass out in four years. They are smart and have first class marks or distinctions. The majority have knowledge, but zero application. While 4000 skillsets are recognized in the USA, India only recognizes 300. The problem of non-employability in India can be tackled by helping students understand that developing their skills is as important as scoring good grades. We need to identify the inherent intelligences & skill sets that each individual is born with, and build on the strengths to ensure that they become successful.
In India, the choice of career path is generally made just after and based on the SSC or Std. X Board exams. However, these results are not an indicator of the student’s strengths or challenges. Also, in most cases, the parents or the peer group dictate the choice for higher education.
Being in the wrong career can cause immense stress. You don’t want to be taking the path of becoming a doctor and then realising you want to be an engineer. It is an expensive journey — not only financially, but health-wise too. The effect of such a wrong career choice does to one’s self-esteem and self-confidence is unimaginable.
Therefore it is critical to help a child figure out what is their interest area and help them develop it at an early age. The only way to connect all this scientifically – development of age appropriate skillsets that leads to a deeper understanding of a child’s inherent strengths and interests — is knowing the person and his qualities, not in a general way, but evaluated scientifically.
Evaluation of the person to understand her/his intelligence, aptitude, interests, skills and challenges is the first step for proper guidance.
At UTKRANTI we scientifically evaluate the individual’s strengths and challenges, then help her/him develop the strengths and overcome the challenges.