Arshad Wazir
Choosing the best educational option is one of the most important decisions in a person’s life, so this decision must be made thoughtfully. The experiences, difficulties and hardships I have faced gave me an energy to pen down this topic. I was neither guided nor I had any consultation before my admission but my luck brought me here and now I am striving days and nights in order to change my luck into my success. Career planning refers to what educational plan you want to pursue and how you want to develop as a result, is best done by consulting a professional career-counsellor. But the number of career counsellors in Pakistan is negligible. As per my personal knowledge no career counsellor can work personally. Some educational institutions hire career-counsellors on their own. But if you’re looking for a career-counsellor for your child or yourself, you will never find, so here are some useful tips that can help you to determine your future career. Another approach to career planning is to do it yourself, a process that professional career-counsellors opt for. It is the process which will surely help you to determine which field might suits you better. Students or parents should keep the following points in mind for career planning. Testing Basic Intelligence/IQ Level should be the first step while choosing a field of study. This test is intended to measure the mental abilities of any human being on a scientific basis to determine whether a student has the basic ability to enter the desired field or not. Well, you as a parent know better about your child and each student himself about his/her mental capacity and whether he/she should enrol in that course/field). This is the basic requirement for better career planning. There are many books available in the market to find out basic intelligence which you can make use of. It is also a modern method of IQ test which provides more comprehensive information. Having results of IQ test the student becomes in a position to clearly decides in which field he can perform better and indeed better performance brings fruitful results. The higher a student’s score on the test, the more intelligent he or she is considered. The IQ test consists of several sections, which assess science, language, social cognition, mathematics, and complex problem-solving ability and provide an average estimate of skills in various areas of life. For instance, a student who is good at social sciences must not waste his energy on physical sciences keeping in mind the success stories of his/her predecessors. Personal interest of the student must be kept in mind in the process of choosing a best option. No work can be taken from any person against his will. Even if done compulsively, it will not have the finesse that comes from doing it with interest. Similarly, unless a student has personal interest in a task, he will not be successful in that field. Therefore, most of all parents need to understand that they should not impose their will on children and take care of students’ passion and will i.e. their interest in career selection stages, otherwise all their hard work will be wasted later. It is feared to happen and it has happened many times. Remember that people fail in real life not because they don’t have talent, or because they don’t have intelligence, or because they don’t have advanced degrees, but because they are simply heartless; without interest. Family Economic Condition plays a pivotal role in getting education. It is very important to consider the economic conditions of your family while choosing any course for yourself or your child. A large number of male and female students in Pakistan want to opt for the profession of doctor, but at the government level, the number of medical colleges and seats in the country is shamefully low. Every year, hundreds of thousands of male and female students from all over Pakistan aspire to get admission in medical colleges. But only a few thousand of them get admission and for the rest only private colleges are left with very high fees. No offense of this profession is intended, but isn’t it better to have a back-up plan than to be desperate in such a situation? There are many people who get discouraged when they don’t get admission in medical colleges and keep trying for many years wasting time and energy and getting discouraged every year when they don’t get admission. While many people turn this failure into success by adopting their other field of interest. Gender matters a lot when deciding whether one should opt for physical sciences, medical sciences or social sciences. There is a lot of narrow view of women in Pakistani society, so girls should choose those fields in which they will not have too many difficulties if they want to work in practical life. In some cases, it has been seen that girls of their choice have obtained a degree in civil engineering with good grades but they could not get jobs in good companies, because the owners of private companies used to tell them that we will hire men instead of them. According to career counselling-experts, if such girls had chosen architecture instead of civil engineering, they would not have faced many difficulties in practical life and their passion for construction would have been fulfilled. Similarly, young boys cannot do the work of primary school teachers. They will get tired of the small children in the class very quickly and start torturing them immediately. Keepin in consideration the above mentioned factors, a student should think wether the field he/she has choosed has a market valuev: This means that most of our students and their parents are not aware of the academic fields they can enrol in at this time. For example, generally aspirants doing FSC Pre-Medical are not aware of the other branches after that, although in Pakistan apart from MBBS/BDS, Pharmacy, Veterinary, Medical Sciences, Biomedical, Chemical there are vast opportunities for education and employment in the fields of medical, agricultural, microbiology and allied medical sciences like psychiatry, psychology, physiotherapy etc. It is not all the fault of the parents or the students but also of our government which has never done anything in this direction and neither the government universities nor the responsible departments of education have tried to publish such material. So you have to work hard for yourself and explore all the educational opportunities available to you.Choosing the best field of study is the most important decisions for every student and his family, so every student must choose the best field for him by looking at his personality, ability, desire, mental capacity, financial resources and practical needs. A choice has to be made very thoughtfully because it is not a grocery items to be changed again and gain. Once you choose a field you have to stick with it throughout your life. Since the needs and problems of each member of society are different, one department may be best for one student but worse for another student. Therefore, each person has to decide for himself which field of study is best for him according to his resources and circumstances
