Why career discovery should start in school, not after graduation

When parents today ask us to help their children find the right career, they are asking the right question in the wrong direction. The instinct is good. The real question however is being missed out.The standard response aptitude tests, career counselling workshops, guest lectures from professionals is not wrong. It is simply something which is emergent from a more foundational question that needs to be asked. It addresses the question of which career before it has addressed the real question of who is this child, and how do they think?That foundational question is the one schools need to start with. And most are not.The careers that today's students will inhabit will look very different from the ones their parents navigated. This is not only because of artificial intelligence, though AI is a significant force. It is because multiple change vectors are converging simultaneously- technological disruption, a shifting geopolitical order, climate pressures, and the genuinely different relationship that younger generations have with work and life balance.

In such an environment, preparing a child for a specific career is a little like trying to search for a Google Map location to a city that is being built in the future (ie – what the world will look like 10-15 years down the line) while these children are still in school.Whilst most of the current dialogue around careers is around speculations about what will change and will be future proof? There is also a more simple question -What does not change and what no algorithm can replicate.

That is the quality of a person's inner life. Their capacity for curiosity. Their ability to tolerate uncertainty without panic. Their resilience when things do not go as planned. Their skill in building genuine relationships.

These are not soft skills at the edges of education. They are the core preparation for any working life, in any era.This is where schools have a role that parents, however well-intentioned, cannot fully discharge.Most parents approach their child's career from one of two perspectives- the anxiety of their own professional pressures, or the frame of reference built during their own youth in a very different kind of economy and world. Neither is a reliable guide to a world that is changing faster than lived experience can track. And structurally, a parent's vantage point is necessarily restricted to just their experience or their colleagues or friends.

They are navigating one child, one family's circumstances, one emotional weather system.Schools carry a different kind of intelligence. A good school observes thousands of children across many years noticing which ones light up during a debate, which ones come alive when given an open-ended problem, which ones show quiet leadership in a group that no grade ever captures. That pattern recognition, applied with care, is more honest career guidance than any standardised aptitude test.But the deeper work we at schools can do is not identification it is formation. Social and emotional learning programs, when done well, give children the tools that will serve them in any profession: self-awareness, the ability to communicate with precision and empathy, resilience in the face of setbacks, and the capacity to build trust with other people. The Harvard Study of Adult Development -the longest running social science study of its kind found that the single greatest predictor of a fulfilling life was not professional success but the quality of human relationships.

Schools that understand this are not being idealistic. They are being practical in the deepest sense.What career discovery actually requires, at its root, is a child who knows how to think calmly about themselves and who have developed what might be called a sovereign frame of mind. Not a child who has been told what they are good at, but one who has been given enough space, enough challenge, and enough honest reflection to begin to find out for themselves.That kind of inner clarity in our experience does not emerge from a career counselling session in Class 11. It emerges from years of being in an environment that treats emotional development as seriously as academic performance.The question schools should be asking is not: what will this child do? It is: what kind of person are we helping them become? The career, in the end, will follow.(Mr Praneet Mungali, a dedicated educationist and Trustee at the Sanskriti Group of Schools.)