Passion-based career choices

The challenge statement

My favourite challenge is to find out how to assist people to know their real passion/passions and create a system to help them find it/them starting from an early age leading to a successful and profitable career.

           It is to answer the questions like what is that one thing that really drives me and for which I can go to any length? How do I choose? How do I even know that I am not passionate about an area if I have not even tried it - like playing the piano, or playing polo. My main point of concern is if a system can exist where each person is exposed to a variety of areas which they can take part in since their childhood and then they slowly narrow it down to a few choices based on their passion before choosing some skills to master throughout life and happily make an earnest living out of it.

A solution

Although the realistic solution for this is a change in the full system of how the Indian education works and give the children more freedom on choosing what to learn and what not to, I will try to narrow down the solution to a concrete idea.

The exposure to a variety of career options depends on the family background of the children, the parents’ profession and their wealth, the place where they grow up, the school, etc. Therefore, not all are exposed to a variety of career options. Most of the students’ learning is micro-managed and controlled by the school/college/parents. This led me to think why not bring Google’s famous “20% time” policy in schools and colleges as well. There can be one period per week where the student can choose to study any subject or work on any project of his/her choice. The project need not be academic and can be anything which the student is really passionate about, be it “Life of a lawyer” or “How music affects our psychology”. The focus is not exactly on the subject but how the student approaches the problem and come to a solution as it will test his/her passion and enthusiasm on the career choice he wants to make – if the student is really passionate about the sport he wants to play or the music instrument he wants to learn. I took a leap of faith assumption that if such an idea has worked so well for businesses in various companies, it must work well for young, enthusiastic students in a school and college setup as well.

              A major drawback of the current education system is that there is no exposure for the students in schools to the variety of career options possible and how to reach such a position. It is one thing to be passionate about something but it’s a whole different thing to work hard and reach that level to transform that passion to a profitable career. The project on this “Study anything” period will push the students to reach out to those professionals who have made a successful career out of a similar passion. This would allow the students to understand their journey to the top and how their current work actually is and then the student can decide if he/she is still up for pursuing that passion.

              Another positive takeaway from this method would be when each of the students present their project and the learnings in front of the whole class after working on the topic for a term/semester. This would make some students be interested in others’ projects which he/she may not have ever known otherwise. Thus, it creates a chain effect and exposes all the students to a variety of career choices and actual success stories. It is very important for any school/college to find a champion among the students who actually pursues his/her passion and reaches the goal to have a profitable career out of his passion. Such a champion will inspire many more to take such a route and make the “Study anything” period a huge hit.

              A very important part of this method is the support of the parents. For most students in India, their parents are the decision-makers of their future during school/college. Therefore, the parents should be thoroughly involved throughout the project, so that even they know what their child is passionate about and good at. Besides, this would help even the parents understand that their child can actually make a good and happy living out of his/her passion in the future.

Feels-like prototype

 Here I have tried to explain the solution with a storyboard where a student is not sure what career to choose as he does not have the proper exposure on how to follow his passion to help the people around him and alleviate their sufferings and still make a profitable career. With the traditional way, he got into engineering and got stuck in a job which he did not like at all. But with the passion-based career choice-making system, he was exposed to various options, he had no idea about before-hand, and he was able to find out by narrowing down different options that he can become a civil lawyer, follow his passion, make a good living as well as get his parents' support for choosing such a path.

Looks-like prototype

I have tried to visualize the solution with a looks-like prototype using a cardboard box. It symbolizes how a newbie enthusiastic student enters the passion-based career choice-making system and gets exposed to many career options which are inclined towards his passion. He also gets to meet the professionals from various career options in each of the chambers, talk with them and narrows down his career choices to a few which he is actively going to pursue and become a master in them for a profitable career.

1 day experiment to test feasibility

a)    What to do – To test the proposed solution in a day, the “Study anything” period or class can be tried in a school or college. The students would be asked to write a list of all careers that they find desirable and are passionate about. Lets call this the “Want box”. A second list will contain a set of all careers that are realistic to potentially achieve and make a profitable career out of. We will call this the “Reality box”. The overlapping area between the two boxes contains the optimal career path choices of the student. We will call this the “Option pool”. Now for each of the choice in the Option Pool, the student will make a list of at least 2-3 professionals who has make a successful career out of the passion areas. He can take help of friends, family and faculty in each of these steps to refine the choices and get the contacts. He would reach out to the professionals on call/via email and actually understand their journey to success and what they do now. This would help them narrow down the choices to the ones they can actually visualize themselves doing for a happy living. We will call this the “Future-action box”. The results of the experiment can be presented to the class that day or the next which may lead to other students getting interested in various career options as well. Now, it is understood that he would not be able to take the decision to choose a career right away in a day – say he wants to be a pianist then it would need him to actually master piano before actually taking it as a profession. But what the experiment achieves is it gives an exposure to the realities of different careers choices, understanding of how well the student can utilize his/her passion for a successful career and what path needs to be taken to achieve that goal and if he/she is ready to pursue that path.

Assumptions for the experiment :

1)     The students are mature enough to understand what they are actually passionate about and are able to list them out in the “Want box” and actually wants to make a career out of his/her passion and not just follow money.

2)   The professionals whom the students are going to interview would provide an unbiased feedback with both the positive and negative aspects of their journey and the career which would help the students to come to concrete decision.

3)  The solution can be expanded to a massive scale to help all the students in India and would create a network of experts who would guide such students.

4)  The parents of the students would actually allow their children to take part in such a system and would even pay for their happy future to make this commercially viable model.

b)    Hypothesis – The major hypothesis here is that by talking to the successful professionals from various sectors, the students would be able to take a rational decision to narrow down their list from the “Want box” to the “Future-Action box” by eliminating those choices which they feel are not that suitable for them.

c)   Cost – The cost of the experiment would be the internet charges for searching/emailing, the calling charges to different people and the cost of the pen and paper for drawing the diagram of the “Want box”, the “Reality box”, the “Option pool” and the “Future-action box”.

d)   Measuring success – If we want to quantify the measure of success for this experiment, it would be how much the student is able to narrow down from the “Want box” to the “Future-action box”. The number of items in the “Future-action box” should be much lesser than the “Want box” and would contain the items that the student would actually pursue actively from the next day. But the actual success would be the exposure that the students would get about the various career options, even the ones they had no idea about before.