Choosing a stream after class 10th is the beginning of your professional career, so you should always think through, before making any decision and that’s the reason career counseling is crucial at this moment. Having said that, you can always correct your mistakes, later in life, but “prevention is always better than cure. At the age of 16, with no real-world experience, it’s difficult to make decisions on your own and you tend to feel dependent on others for your decisions. But who are these people? Mostly family, friends, or teachers are your first point of contact. Let me share a thought process, to identify the right career track. Seeking help from an expert would be a good idea, but if you can’t do that, then you can keep these things in mind before making any decision:
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Career Counseling Steps – What you should not do?
– Peer Influence: All your friends are unique and with different potential, so never ever decide anything based on your friend’s opinion or inclination. You might have a friend, who has scored very much like you, then you might take the course, which he/she is taking. Keep your friendships and career decisions separate.
–Never follow a top to bottom approach: This means, that tomorrow if someone comes to you and suggests you some career option and you immediately start looking for it because you might trust the person or he/she is close to you. For example, your distant cousin convinces you to pursue science, and you get carried away, which is quite normal at that stage, so it would be difficult for you to cope up with the course and later you might have to change.
– Family Pressure: Our parents are also under a lot of social influence, so they may suggest something very popular or what they hear in their own circle. Until and unless they give you some convincing reason for a career, don’t just accept and move on. The problem here again is that the ideas from parents are generally not based on your interest or passion. In some cases, its good also, where parents actually make informed decisions, based on their child’s interest, but in the majority of cases its the reverse.
– Social media & internet influence: Seeing in believing – you don’t have to follow this, because what is popular as per the current trends, might not be the best option for you. Generally, media reports and internet information is misleading, because most of the information published is not independent. This leads us to our next step of career counseling.
Career Counseling Steps – What should you do?
Start from within – Introspection is the key here and asking questions is important in this process. These are the four dimensions that you can start looking at.
– Academic background: Analyse your scores for the past 2 years and see a trend if you can. For example, you might be doing great in Maths, but not so good in Social Science. Try and see the best 1-2 courses, where you had done well. This will give you a decent understanding of your academic potential.
– Interests: You might have scored well in maths, but you love social science. This is very common in students. We always give priority to our scores. This is what you don’t have to do. You need to strike a balance and choose the best, which combines your score and interest area as well. You can also pen down your interests apart from academics, such as talent search exams, debates, and other activities, where you are doing well. Then combine it with your academics and try to see the trends.
Finding passion is often difficult in life, but exploring interests can lead you to your passion eventually. This is what you have to explore and see where all you are interested in. Now, finding interest means you should be doing something about that regularly and seriously.
– Personality: This is a very important part of our growth for any career. You can always for different types of assessments available in the market, but first try and write down all your strengths, weaknesses, and areas of improvement. You will answer a lot of questions about yourself. Focus on 3 areas primarily such as EQ, grit, and attitude. This can be analyzed with the help of your past experiences.
– Skills: Most of the students fail to address this part and often mix this with personality. A few examples of your skills could be, a good computer or programming skills, reasoning skills, communication skills, multiple language ability, etc. List down where all you are good at or learned in the past.
If you can even do 50% of the above, you will still be very clear and in a position to challenge anyone, who suggests you something. The next step would be to map your abilities, which you have discovered, to various career options and see where you could be a good fit.
Here you need to seek guidance from an expert coach, who has worked in the industry and can guide you on this. But now your discussion will be at a different level because you will be self-aware after this exercise. In the end, it’s your career, so you need to be in the driver seat and the rest of us will support you, to drive in the right direction. Finally, nobody can guarantee a success formula, because that doesn’t exist. But, career counseling at different stages of your life will help you fail less, and succeed more. This will give self-confidence because the more you know yourself, the better it is, not only for your career but also for your life.
We hope this is going to be helpful if you are planning to choose your stream/course after class 10th. For more guidance, feel free to connect with us for free career counseling and provide your feedback as well.
