Relook at Career Choices

Now that a new academic session stares into our face, we need to reassess our priorities. Job market is changing very fast. New initiatives like ‘Make in India’, ‘Digital India’, ‘Smart Cities’ too are urging a relook at the way we work, live, earn, entertain, spend, consume, save and invest. Jobs and businesses are linked to these human needs. Production of plethora of engineers, doctors, and market professionals will simply not do. Three quarters of engineers turned out by our engineering universities, are anyway unemployable, if surveys are to be believed.
So what should we look for among plenty of career choices? A whole new paradigm shift has taken place in the job market. Computerization has penetrated into billing, invoicing, accounting, transferring data, storing, cataloguing, making inventories etc. These were routine jobs and humans need not be deployed for them anymore. Mere feeding of data allows the software to do the rest of the job. This is making the B.Com graduates redundant. Robots are taking care of assembly line production in the manufacturing sector. They routinely pick and place components and elements in automotive and engineering factories. Humanoid robots are entering the hospitality sectors like hotels, restaurants, hospitals, home for the elderly and amazingly even babycare. Globalisation is dictating convergence of manufacturing at large scale units. For instance, a Volvo factory in India now procures tyres from Malaysia and South Korea, upholstery from Sri Lanka, engine from Sweden, glass panels from Belgium and moulded seats from China. This process reduces hands and labour.
The new jobs lie in construction (as many as 200 different skills), agriculture, veterinary, dairy, meat industry, sericulture, post-harvest technology (including storage, food processing, etc), renewable energy (solar, wind, tidal, biofuel etc), travel, transport and tourism, etc. The hundred smart cities that India is planning, would call for lakhs of electronic professionals. Foreign languages such as German, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic too would bring in jobs. It will be prudent for the community to size up the dimension of requirement in these sectors and direct the youth towards the relevant careers and courses.
The youth too would need to shun the tendency to opt for only ‘clean jobs’ like IT and spurn sectors where hands would have to be dirtied. Globalisation and shop floors too are demanding greater coordination between people from diverse nationalities. This calls for proficiency in multiple languages and high articulation. The training therefore has to incorporate these features in order that graduates being turned out of the colleges and universities have greater tolerance of otherness of the other person working in a remote location. The Muslim community would therefore require to develop keener perception of changing realities of job market and the businesses.