Students’ career decisions—making sense of their confusion, internal conflicts, uncertainties
- career choices
- October 2, 2025
Connecting the students’ thoughts by deep analysis
Students have their doubts and confusion while planning their career and the college, and families generally do not have any framework or reference to connect these fragmented thoughts.
We often see the students sharing the internal conflict and the doubts they have for selecting a career path and the college. This happens because their criteria is too disconnected—they see career growth, their interests in the subjects, their parents or loved one’s opinions, the college, their budget, and also the discussions in the online groups. Their struggle is not about the options, it is in finding the right lens to see this divergence, the conflict, the gap, and the possible convergence of ideas.
Here is another example of a student, Saanvi who responded in the Steering discovery, as below.
The Steering questionnaire is text based, and the students respond at their own pace; they may take days to reply. They have all the time, the context, the examples and references, and we give then a lot of confidence to be honest and transparent while answering these questions.
Another student, Avneet responded to a related question as below.
The students are thoughtful, watchful, and curious. However, their thoughts are fragmented sometimes, and they do not have any framework to connected the dots. Some of them have fairly healthy conversations in the family and we have been part of many such discussions (see an example where the parents are in software).
The students try to find the answers on search engines, in online communities, or they talk to their friends and guides in their network. Most often, it does not help.
Some parents use use career counselling tools but many of these tools are not designed to address such subjective concerns raised by the students. The tools are designed for the aptitude and personality analysis, these do not build any convergence of opinions, or domain-centric models.
We have designed Steering to address these fundamental concerns first. It is first about the dialogues and we use the gap and conflict analysis to find the career options.
Quick summary of gap analysis
For Avneet’s questions about the career options and her college selection dilemma, they cannot think of possible solutions if they cannot see the gaps clearly enough.
High-level theme for her career aspirations
Based on the interactions with Avneet, we could have a basic convas to dive deeper into the analysis. You can see a high-level view of the theme of her career aspirations.
Our analysis includes visuals and structured report on conflict, uncertainties, confidence, relationship mapping, and other criteria before we start building the emergent themes for the career decisions.
Our goal is not to make career decisions—our goal is to build students’ capacity to take their own decisions.
Sometimes the families leave it up to the students because either their opinions are too different from each other and they run out of patience of energy, or they trust their kid to make the best decisions.
It leaves the students short of all the support when they are stuck because the family does not have a structured support system to refer to. Steering works with families to serve as support system for each other for students’ career guidance and counselling discussions.
Students career counselling for family dynamics
We can see hundreds of examples in online communities, such as on Reddit too. Steering is proud to be working with the students and their families and loved ones to build the bridges and let them steer their career discussions with the right confidence, evidence, and with a lot more clarity.
To select a career and a college merely on the guesswork and based on what others advise is a huge risk—and it is such a waste when the student wants to change the college after one year in the college.
We need more sense-making systems to work at the foundations first—gap and conflict analysis, to find the uncertainty in their minds, and build the confidence upwards towards subjects, streams, and colleges.
We have a free trial for you.
Our analysis structure in the free plan helps you in thinking deeply about your life-dreams, aspirations, wishes, and in connecting the dots for what you want to do, what skills you should learn, how to apply those skills in real life work, and what brings joy in your life when you grow up.
Steering is open for private access at present. You can take the free trial to get started.