Teaching as an Unplanned Career Choice

Switching to a new job is difficult but what is more difficult is to make career choice just after graduating. After graduation one has to face tough scenario of opting an appropriate employment. With reference to neck to neck competition in job market of Pakistan where job opportunities are lesser than the number of students graduating, one has to make compromises. Coping with this fierce job competition many graduates (generally female graduates) end up teaching at schools because “something is better than nothing”. It is very unfortunate to find business graduates or research scholars with major subjects such as bio-chemistry, teaching primary-level classes.

The situation is not only worse for the job-seeker but the students as well. The basics of education imparted at Montessori level or primary school level holds immense importance in shaping an individual’s future life. Disinterested teachers are curse to education sector. If such a teacher is appointed for educating children in their tender age that has opted teaching as a time-pass profession and is expected to leave anytime then it can actually disturb child’s learning to a great extent. The child would experience lack of passion for learning because he/she had emotional bonding with previous teacher and lost bonding deteriorates level of enthusiasm for learning among them.

As explained by Law and Watts (1977), the choice of career should be based on DOTS (decision-making, opportunity, transition and self). Firstly, there has to be an analysis of self in which an individual should realize their skills and capabilities and make an analysis accordingly that what job would match their personality. In the above mentioned circumstances, graduates fail to follow this first and most important step before making employment decision. They simply move to opportunity and make final decision through transition (CV and interviews). Therefore, by missing foremost need of self-assessment final decision on the whole becomes invalid.

The need of the hour is to introduce more sophisticated ways of hiring teachers. There should be proper certifications for awarding teaching license and to make it more workable these certificate courses should be offered as a part of degree programs. For instance, at the completion of master degree one has to go through an additional exam which assess individual’s strength and skill to decide whether they are suitable for teaching or not and what levels of classes they can teach effectively. The benefits of this technique would be duo-fold. It would be helpful in bringing improvements in education sector by appointing deserving teachers and refrain graduates from making wrong long-term career choices for short-term benefit.