Going beyond teaching: Building careers that matter!!

By Clive Mutame Siachiyako

Teachers touch many lives. Everyone who sat in a classroom or open learning spaces passed through the hands of a teacher. Teachers do not only teach children how to calculate, read, writing or practically do lab works. They motivate, inspire and nurture careers as well.

With parents preoccupied with other things and spending less time with their children, teachers know a lot about children that parents may not know. They know children’s strengths, weaknesses, abilities, talents and their potential career pathways. Teachers are thus indispensable in career development of a child. They are pillars and builders of careers. No one can take that from them. By virtue of them teaching children from tender ages to maturity, they walk with them a large part of their life.

Parents can learn some important things about their children that they may not have known without visiting or talking to teachers. Teachers are therefore a very significant resource parents can count on in helping their children make career choices. Because of their strategic position in children’s career development, I suggest close collaboration between teachers and tertiary institutions. An in-depth explaining of my reasoning is explained below:

Pertinent collaboration

Despite their strategic position in shaping children’s careers, teachers tend to operate in a different world from the whole of tertiary learning and labour market requirements. This gap makes teachers work behind current tertiary and labour market requirements from learners leaving the school system. This negates the role of the teaching fraternity in career development.

Firstly, some schools end up having wrong subject combinations that disadvantage children’s entry into tertiary education. I will use my example here. I went to a school that offered Commerce and Principles of Accounts. When it comes to university entry, the two subjects are put in the same category of commercials. It means having good grades in them negated my chances of entry into university. In addition, we had an option to take biology or agricultural sciences. One who wanted to go into the school of natural sciences at university or medical related programmes but had not done biology was ruled out. Some children as a result do not get into desired programmes in which they have to ability, talent and passion for due to wrong subject combinations.

Secondly, teachers need to know available programmes in tertiary education for them to be in better position to guide children in career choices. Knowledge limitation of programme portfolios limit children’s variety of careers options to choice from...they operate within what teachers let them know about. Parents’ guidance become more than supplementary here, but most parents are too busy to sit with their children and talk about career issues. There are too many absentee parents. Present in homes but too busy with work, outing or in the internet maze.

Parents have to create concrete links with teachers to know their children better and be more useful in shaping children’s careers. Providing school fees alone is not enough. Parents can call teachers, drop them an email or visit them for parental talks on matters of their children’s welfare school wise. Parents can learn a lot of class teachers, careers masters or other teachers close to the children. They are useful resources. Utilise them for the good of the children.

Thirdly, teachers need links with the industry or have access to industrial information portals. Labour market portals are important resources for picking relevant information in helping children make right career choices. Teachers are able to know what new competencies, skills and attributes the industry expects from learners that require nurturing at a very early stage. This is more important now that vocational education school has become part of the general education system. Learners who leave the school system for whatever reasons and enter the labour market are expected to possess certain attributes for them to fit in well in the labour market.

The labour market provides a “pull” to complement the "push" from schools. Careers are about employment or doing business as entrepreneurs. Employer’s career guidance mix is paramount. For example, a history teacher needs a pool of knowledge on how entrepreneurs have helped determine the course of human events. History teachers can do a great deal to expand the horizons of their learners by focusing on case studies of entrepreneurs who have contributed to the betterment of humankind. Such knowledge comes from industry linkages. Pupils need to have multiple opportunities through their school life to learn about the world of work.

Fourthly, the teaching fraternity and curriculum developers need close links to achieve relevant subject combinations and add apt aspects to the curriculum realisable through information sharing and co-construction on learners careers. Teachers are often not aware to modern changes in the tertiary system or labour market. It is not their role anyway to carry-out labour market surveys.

Collaborative career development is thus very significant. Children depend on many players to make right career choices. Each one has to play their role to make children’s inborn and learned skills earn them a good life. Children are often caught akimbo into the chaos of direction-less career guidance system due to poor coordination of things.

It is time to get talking. It is time to create life changing linkages. It is time to get real and get counted in building careers of children. It is time to make you information communication technologies to gather information and sharing it with those relevant to the development of children’s careers. Those in custody of labour market information have to share with the teaching fraternity. Teachers responsible for career guidance can do more to narrow the gaps to ensure schools churn out right candidates for tertiary education.