Career Counseling – Do you know what you are in for?

ReKruiTIn.com | Career Advice 

Counseling can play a crucial role in the career choices of a student. It is a process that helps a student determine the right career option through evaluation of the student’s aptitude, general interest and other relevant qualities. Hence, it is advisable to have regular counseling sessions, which will help identify the right career choice for an individual student.

Identifying the right career for a student is, however, a difficult task. It involves thorough analysis of several factors, and accordingly guiding the student. There are various elements that influence this process and if the evaluation process is not right, it may lead to incorrect career choices. A student expects the right advice from a counselor and hence the right methodology needs to be followed.

In order to facilitate this, counselors must ensure that students feel comfortable while speaking with them, and share their own opinions and thoughts for the facilitation of a dialogue. Counseling must start early, so that the process can be given sufficient time and the student as well as the parents are advised properly. It is feasible to start the counseling process while a student is in the 9^th standard, and this process must continue, through frequent sessions, till the time the specialisation of the stream is determined in class 11^th.

Career counseling needs to go beyond testing the aptitude of the students and must include identifying the interest of students in terms of career choices. While aptitude determines what can be a good career choice for a student, it may not give a complete picture. It is equally important to gauge the level of interest that a student has in a particular type of career and to make the student realise that the interest is genuine and not temporary or influenced by parental or peer pressure.

While there are several coaching classes that help students to crack entrance exams, these are not synonymous with career counseling centers. Counseling must begin much earlier and should continue till the time the student is able to make the right career choices. Coaching classes cater to a limited number of career choices - the ones that are termed as ‘top career options’ by students and parents. However, in today’s scenario, there are many career options available that help students utilize their potential to the maximum. Many of these options did not exist earlier and are beyond the realm of traditional career directions. Counseling, therefore, plays a critical role by not just helping students and parents in identifying the potential that a student has, but also by providing them information about various career options that might suit a particular student.

Counseling encompasses a larger perspective and must have contributions from not just the counselor, but also schools and parents. A counselor may just facilitate the process, but schools and parents need to guide students in terms of the recommendations made by the counselor. This would ensure that the students make right career choices.

-ReKruiTIn.com Team

Want to Start Your Career Planning Early? Get the Most Out of Your Internship

Summer internship is a good medium to get professional exposure at an early stage of your career. While you might be a few months away from beginning your actual career, summer internship lets you understand what a real life work environment entails. It gives you the exposure and the experience that will help you later in your career.

ReKruiTIn.com - Importance of Internship

Why is Internship Important?

For students, an internship is a great way to understand the professional environment in which they would work in the future. It gives them the orientation and insight into working in a professional organisation. The experience as an intern helps them develop the right kind of skills needed to survive, sustain and grow in professional lives. These are the techniques and skills that cannot be taught in classrooms and can only be developed and honed in real work environments. These skills are crucial in terms of developing a perspective towards one’s professional life, as well as working as a part of a larger and professional group of people.  

How Can Internships Help?

Interns need to extract as much benefit as possible from their internships. It helps them start early in their professional lives and enable them to learn and develop their professional skills. Internships serve as great on-job training and help an individual become proficient. To achieve these goals, interns must learn to accept the responsibilities given to them, no matter how insignificant or mundane they might feel. It is important to complete any assigned task with sincerity and a positive attitude.

This helps in developing an insight and professional attitude towards assigned responsibilities. While the assigned tasks may not help much in terms of value addition and learning, these tasks certainly help interns to be responsible and develop their networking skills. Developing a strong network in the workplace helps an intern in the future, especially in getting decent professional opportunities and priority in consideration for a specific job role. A good impression created during the internship phase might help interns to get a job opportunity from the organization where they have interned.

Developing a strong network also helps interns receive strong professional references from the people they worked with during internship. This is a long term benefit if interns are able to develop strong references from their internship phase.

Another important benefit that young interns can derive from their internship phase is learning new skills apart from their current qualifications, and area of specialization. For example, an intern who is pursuing MBA in Finance might learn about logistics in the internship phase. This might not translate into an actual job role; but internship gives the opportunity to look beyond one’s own realm of professional domain and grow as an all round professional.  

ReKruiTIn.com Team

Distance Learning or Regular MBA - Which One Would You Choose?

Pursuing a Masters in Business Administration is a resounding success story. Yes, MBA is expected to open all important career and pay gates for you. One would be called a well qualified and smart individual all their life, if the decision to pursue an MBA gets them a high figure paycheck.

Every year, thousands of working and non working professionals enter the gates of some or the other B schools worldwide for personal and career betterment. Yes, an MBA can as much be a choice you make for personal growth and betterment as it will be a career booster. In India, there are millions of universities offering regular and distance learning MBA programmes. So what will influence a professional’s choice for opting from among a regular MBA programme or a distance learning MBA programme?

Purists may argue that there is no substitute for a regular degree as regular MBA colleges from all over the world are known for their rigorous entry procedures. These entry procedures ensure that only the best of the lot enter a prestigious B-school, and then the best of the most intelligent minds are groomed further to become seasoned management professionals. Besides preparing oneself for a tough entrance exam battle, it takes years to build a good professional profile that will impress B-school admission panels to even consider you for a seat in an MBA batch. All things said and done, there may be some management aspirants who would not be willing to take an expensive sabbatical from work to pursue learning. For such aspirants, a distance learning option would be a more viable one, as it will give them the flexibility to earn and learn.

There are institutes that let you in for MBA with less rigid procedures. Here the distance learning MBA may not guarantee a very fat paycheck, as soon as you enroll for the course, but would ensure continued learning, personal betterment and would sound a less expensive and more practical way of understanding management essentials.

Distance learning MBA may sound lucrative on the pretext of getting flexibility of study hours, submission of assignments and sitting for semester exams. However, it everybody may not be able to be successful in juggling many hats like family, job and education together. Distance learning education is successful only if one is able to exercise high amount of self discipline.

Some factors to keep in mind while selecting a distance learning B-school

1. How well does the B-school offer to keep you engaged during the MBA programme?
2. What is the efficiency with which technology can be implemented in the programme?
3. What is the expected return on investment for the programme?
4. What will be the schedule of tutorials, assignments and exams under the programme?
5. Is the degree recognized by government accreditation boards?
6. How efficient is the programme support staff ?

Pursuing a regular or an online degree is as much a matter attitude as it is of convenience. One can make a choice between regular and distance learning MBA  programme, based on salary and career expectations one has from the programmes as well as the time and cost involved.