Career counselling can help students at the bottom of the academic pyramid regain their confidence, said Ganesh Kohli, founder, International Career and College Counselling Movement (IC3). Mr. Kohli spoke to The Hindu on the sidelines of the fourth annual conference on career counselling, about the movement’s inception, the response they have received, quality education and more. Excerpts.
What does IC3 do?
We have the IC3 regional forums. There were 28 of them in nine countries, and 28 different cities. In India, we’ve done regionals in Raipur, Ranchi, Baramati, Aurangabad, in Tamil Nadu. We’ve done a regional forum in Dispur, Assam, and are going into deeper pockets of the country. Throughout the year, we offer a free one-year training programme for full-time school employees. Ashoka University supports that along with O.P Jindal University, Shiv Nadar University and the Gwalior University, and other Indian universities are recently joining the group and helping out in training teachers to become career and college counsellors.
When did you start this movement?
It started in 2016, and our first conference was in August that year. The idea came in late 2015, and was born out of a survey of grumpy 35-year-olds. We wanted to see why they were grumpy on Monday mornings and what is the correlation between school and work life. We found an astonishing 84% of the people who took that survey said they were unhappy, and their work was linked in some way or form to the guidance or the lack of it that they received in school. We subsequently found a correlation between road rage and the lack of career counselling. What we realised is that people are unhappy at least half of the time because of their professional issues. You don’t go wrong at 30 or 35; the start of the journey is when you go wrong. If you’re taking a 5,000-mile journey, if you’ve taken the wrong road in the first 100 miles, chances are you will go further astray. That is something we are working on: transition from school to the university, and generally enhancing the learning outcome in school. Because counselling also allows contextualisation of textbook knowledge to the real world.
How many schools have you trained?
I’d say we have impacted over 2,000 schools by now, but in terms of the IC3 institute and doing the training, we are only graduating our first cohort this evening. It’s a small number right now: 23 teachers will become career and college counsellors, and will graduate today with a certificate in career and college counselling. They are from 19 different cities and two countries. Our theme is inclusion and we want to train as many as we can.
How has the response been?
Things are starting to move. In industry, there is change, but when it comes to schools and universities, change has been very slow, and has not kept pace with the world of jobs and careers. It is human nature: we have our comfort, and generally become very repetitive. Education has been that way too. The concept of having career and college counselling in school did not exist, and still does not. We are letting young ones out of school like aeroplanes without a navigation system. These aeroplanes are then going to crash in a world of despair, frustration, anger, sadness and disappointment. It is our prerogative not just to teach Maths and English, but also to provide direction. One of our goals is to sensitise the entire community.
How could we commodify quality education?
There is enough education available in different parts of the world, and in India, that is a good fit for every student. It doesn’t matter whether she excelled academically or did not in a set of subjects. Every student has a unique ability and talent, and some skills and that uniqueness cannot be taken away. What it requires is the word, ‘individual’. You need to individualise the conversation with that student, and you need to allow her to see that given that she has got 40%, it does not mean she would be miserable for the remaining 70 years of her life. We can systemically alter the reality for every student through career and college counselling. The only reason the child ended up with 40% was because she was not inspired by what she read or what she did in school. But to say that you are now doomed for 60 to 70 years of your life is the biggest tragedy that is taking place due to the lack of career counselling. We have to focus on inclusion and reaching deeper pockets of the country. The Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya Samiti is a school that is doing some phenomenal work. It is a Government of India effort. We need to learn that masses of schools need to adopt this approach of including bottom 70% of students as well.
