For many parents, this is one more difficult decision that has now to be taken in the rat race, that life has become. Like all difficult decisions, it therefore gets postponed until the last moment and is then somehow “got over with”. Many of us spend the rest of our lives finding excuses or justifications for the mistakes that could have been avoided. The process appears all the more bewildering to today’s parents because in the days that they were young, choices just weren’t so many and “listening” to elders was still accepted as “normal” behaviour. They can’t understand how their own children have become so precocious (and hence difficult to browbeat). Parents do deserve sympathy along with good advice on how to really go about this job of choosing the right career for their children.

Do not give importance to what the current trend is – rather find out what your child is comfortable with.

Many careers have been grounded because parents couldn’t wait to see their child become an “engineer” just because the neighbor's kid was an engineer. Most careers require special skills, both educational and psychological. There are tests to determine these and these should be used.
Study the marks that your child obtained in various subjects, during the last few years of his school.
Teach him/her some lessons yourself (parents these days are so dependent on tuition classes that they have almost forgotten the art of teaching ones siblings). Even a few minutes every day will give you an insight into what is being easily understood and what is not. Is he quick on the uptake while studying “physical sciences” or does he excel in languages or is he good at both?

Never insist on the child becoming your own Xerox.
There is no law in genetics that says that children are born with the same skills as their parents. So don’t insist on the impossible. Many frustrations have their root cause in this “yearning” of parents. If a doctor’s son is a good singer, so be it.

Always shortlist two or maximum three alternatives for in-depth study.
Don’t feel bad about being so ignorant of the plethora of alternatives available and more important, don’t feel jealous that these didn’t exist in your time. Now go and talk things over to the concerned experts. Do not, I repeat do not send your child to do this legwork. If it had been possible for him or her to decide, why would you have been in the picture at all? Remember, you can ask the right questions, whatever else you may not be able to do. Attend special seminars that get conducted. If you want your child to go abroad, the field widens and going to more than one expert becomes a must. Do not always presume that the so-called expert is really so. He might have read about what he is telling you, just yesterday.

Choose the right college or training institute.
This could be confusing especially when you are choosing a training institute. Look for two parameters. Has the owner of the training institute successfully cleared the examination that he claims to train his students for? How are the past results of that institution? Past results never tell lies. Insist on talking to at least some of the faculties to get an insight into their competence

Choose the career that gives your child more options later.
If he does BCA (Bachelors in Computer Applications), then the next option has to be MCA. However if he does B.Com. then he could do either M.Com or MCA. Obviously the second one is better. Another good case in point could be the BBA (Bachelors in Business Administration) course that has been started by Bombay University. It is widely accepted that “business management” is a post-graduate course because it pre-supposes certain skills and maturity in the students. The decision to start BBA is to my mind nothing more than grabbing a lucrative opportunity that exists in the “market”. Students and parents are no enamoured with the magic letters- MBA that they are expected to “gobble up” anything that resembles such a degree even at the undergraduate level; under the erroneous impression that it will probably make it easier for their wards to get into prestigious MBA institutes later. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Choose a career that is expected to increase your wards’ “job-value”
Irrespective of what many may say, choose for your ward, a career that you think will get him a more lucrative job. If this also happens to be what he likes most (amongst the two or three which were short-listed), so much the better. Most of the students who choose to become MBAs are because of the pot of gold that they see at the “end of the rainbow” and not because they “love” business management. I see nothing wrong in this provided they are willing to go through the rigours of a good management course. In our culture, parents are expected to mould the careers of their children so that they become competent to support their old parents (how self-serving) later. Don’t criticize them if they do not succeed – it may be due to the incorrect career guidance given earlier. I am reminded of what a wag once said, though in a different context - “Don’t criticize your wife too much; it may be because of these very defects in her that she did not get a better husband”.

"Mr. Prakash Shesh, the author, has done his MBA from Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad after his Masters in Physics from I.I.T. New Delhi. You may send your feedback to him by choosing an option at the top right corner of this page."