Most of the schools in Chandigarh tricity organize students’ career counselling sessions, particularly for the students in grade 9 to 12. It helps the students in their career readiness journey, and they discuss their questions and concerns, and get directions for their career path and college selection.
A few schools partner with independent career counsellors or agencies, while a few others have full time in house career counsellors.
At Steering, we have spoken to a few schools in Chandigarh, Mohali, Panchkula, and in the periphery including in New Chandigarh and Zirakpur, and we have seen a few patterns in how they plan the students’ career guidance activities.
Schools are doing an amazing job
Schools are committed to a fruitful career for the students and so they take these counselling session planning quite seriously. Every school have their own leadership style, their decision making process, and their own sense of urgency depending on their calendar.
Some of them invite industry leaders, coaches, and counselling experts for an interaction with the students. In the process, schools prepare the students in advance to make the best user of the counselling sessions time, and the schools have their own engagement models or partnership terms with the experts or agencies. A few schools have in-house qualified career counsellors who speak to the students for their career path selection.
As has been a common practice worldwide and not only in India, many schools invest in the psychometric tests and analysis of the students. Either the school’s counsellors use an external system for this assessment lifecycle, or they partner with external agencies and EdTech products for the purpose.
The students get an objective analysis of their strengths, their aptitude, their personality and a certain approach to life situations, and they get recommendations for what kind of career paths might be good for them.
The goal
If the students get enough clarity about their career and college selection, and they get the answers to their questions—this is the goal achieved state for the school.
However, we all including the schools might agree that this is half the job done because career counselling and discussions are a work-in-progress. Students and their families see a lot of adjacent possibilities in their decisions, they discuss it in their network, make their own judgment to shortlist the options, and so the decision is often under discussion.
We have experienced it in our discussions with schools in Mumbai, Noida, Gurugram, Jaipur and Udaipur, and in Shimla—career decisions are complicated and multi-dimensional. It impacts the family, their network, and the society in broader sense, and so a report delivered is only part of the students career counselling program’s job.
Even without any counselling if the student says—”I want to learn Python so that I can design custom dashboards.”, or if another student says—”I want to study financial management for big consultancies“, the job of counselling is to help them understand the journey, the trade-offs, the possible challenges and the joys, and how this entire process fits into their family dynamics much beyond those subjects or degree name, or the college internship.
Steering provides a comprehensive, family-centered career guidance that enhances your school’s counselling program success—without adding to your workload.
For Schools
Every school has its own philosophy, leadership style, the vision, and its operating model. For example if you are value-driven, Steering works with you for the purpose and impact first. If you are STEM-centric, we design it for innovation and flexibility.
Our working model is participatory within your guidelines, your brand, and your standards—your counsellors will enjoy getting involved with us. See Steering for schools and if you contact us, this could be the moment that adds a significant differentiator to your school.
See a few posts to understand how Steering takes career counselling holistically, how we involve the families, and how our analysis and the students’ participation is unlike how others are doing it in the industry.