GLOBALIZATION AND CHALLENGES IN CAREER GUIDANCE
Psychology Research Unit
Indian Statistical Institute
203, B. T. Road
Kolkata – 700 108
Respected Rotarian Professor R.J. Pande, Rotarian Mr. Partha Mukhopadhyay, Rotarian Mr. Das and other office bearers of Rotary club, the invited students, I wish you all first “ A very Happy New Year”. In this year, I am going to present one of the most complex issue of career guidance that I conceptualised recently.
What do you want to be in future ? The most difficult question in today’s world of globalisation as labour market is expanding from local to domestic, domestic to international and from international to trans-national. Dual labour economy is reducing, a large increase in the relative size of immigrant workforce, growing prevalence of non standardized work arrangements and rapid job restructuring. Due to rapid job restructuring, most of the today’s job does not exist when we were young. No one can predict the future with certainty. But this globalisation should not be considered as threat to the quality of life but as challenge to improve the quality of life.
Previously, career counsellor was guided by set of organized job. Career was treated as job for which individual tends to train himself. But due to the globalization, definition of career changes. It is not merely a job for which individual intends to train. Now career is nothing but a set of roles having marketing value.
The days are old when function of career counsellor is to find out profile similarity between set of individual characteristics ( personality, aptitude, interest etc.) and job requirements. Now function of career guidance professional is to motivate the counselee to be more innovative so that one can engineer new career or can transfer one career to other career. Their function will be to give bird’s eye view about need based job responsibilities of each career across the globes, about future needs or challenges in the job market and to develop insights about different paths to meet different challenges in career. Some of the paths are given below:
Exporting your knowledge, skills by
- Preparing homepage having biodata in portfolio form;
- Becoming international professional or trade organization;
- Networking with your peers around the world;
- Reconfiguring existing skills to meet the challenges
- Marketing your self – successful marketing means letting key people know about your skills and how you can contribute value. Build diverse network of contents, associate with people beyond your boundaries
- Broaden your interests by reading journals, magazines, national and international news papers
- Develop resilence to withstand all your disappointments
- Value multi cultural experiences and competencies
- Incorporate international knowledge in the curriculum
- Always think of fallen back in your current job and think of global possibilities.
Finally, my suggestion is to understand yourself and reconfigure your self so that you can add marketing value to each component of your self.
Finally, I thank respected dignitaries of Rotary clubs for giving me privilege in presenting some of the recent ideas coming to my mind.
(Invited talk at the Rotary Club, North Kolkata, 21.1.2007, Sunday)
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