According to Forbes , 81 per cent of the people in the world today hate the jobs they are in. Which means only 19 per cent of them have made the right career choices. According to the All India Council for Technical Education, between 2012 and 2015 as much as 44 per cent to 47 per cent of engineering graduates across India were placed in jobs that were not necessarily jobs they loved.
In India, almost half the population is today below the age of 21, which means that one day in the future some 60 crore of our youth would have made the wrong decision and ended up in the wrong career. Which would mean more and more people would hate their Mondays, and look forward only to the weekends.
I was facing the same conundrum of whether or not to continue in my career as an Information Technology professional when I recently picked up this book, I Love Mondays , by Mala Mary Martina. It talks about these new-age careers that people have taken up and pursued. The author calls them Yellow Collar Careers. She talks about doing what you love. Thus to avoid the Monday blues and instead turn them yellow by pursuing your own passion.
As I read about a lot of celebrities and also ordinary people who are happy living their life of choice, a life that they built around pursuing their passion and successfully making it a career, I wanted to know more about these Yellow Collar Careers. Working on a yellow collar career, as the book told me, doesn’t mean that if I love music and want to make it a career I have to become the next A.R. Rahman. In fact, there are so many careers surrounding music that I can get into, such as being a sound/acoustics engineer, a record producer or a folly engineer. These careers were never in my list of career possibilities. I had come to believe after years of conditioning that the engineering degree I got was meant to get me into an IT company that would pay me well but would provide me no real happiness. Since coding to me simply was a means to make money and not something I was happy doing.
The choiceThe more I delved into the concept of yellow collar careers, the more it made sense to me. Instead of leading a life of complaining and whining, I could put my talents to good use while earning enough to support myself. If I wouldn’t want a doctor who didn’t want to be a doctor to treat me, or let a tailor who hated his job to make a dress for me, then why should I be in a job I don’t want to be in?
More reasonsI went through the TEDx talk the author had given and discovered even more reasons why I should start doing what I love. The next generation of careers would need people who can be creative, instead of those who simply try to do what a machine can accomplish more quickly and with better accuracy.
I did not want to be replaced by a computer. And hence I have decided to change the direction of my career and work on something that’ll use my communication skills.
So go ahead and choose your own life to live like I am planning to. Or in the words of the author, “We anyways have to think, Why not think big? We anyways have to work, Why not do what we love?”
r.rashmi2kn@gmail.com
