Career Questions
13/8/21
However might one describe my career, one description which will be without any argument, and hence more accurate is that it has been long. When I turned to full time academic line towards my last phase of my long career one of the regular questions I got asked and was expected to answer was “What is the scope for —- course?” (Fill in the dotted line with any of B.Sc. / B.Tech. / biotechnology / industrial biotechnology /biomedical engineering / genetic engineering / etc.) Not that I did not face this question before, but that was more in the domain of small talk and no one paid any attention to my answer. But once I got into an academic position I felt people asked this question to test me rather than learn anything from my answer. Mostly people wanted affirmations to their own biases or ideas or the decisions they might have already made.
The question mostly was asked by parents trying to decide career paths for their child who was on the verge of leaving school and they were scouting for a ‘good’ university / college / program for him/her. At times the question was asked by their children, but mostly the children accompanied their parents to see how their parents were convincing themselves.
I have never answered this question honestly. Let me explain. There is no single or simple answer to this question, which means any answer will be correct to some degree. When I say ‘honestly’ I just mean that I don’t give the answers which I believed were most correct, in my best judgment. So, in some sense, I have deceived my interrogator. To begin with, the question itself was not honest. They really want to ask “will my son/daughter get picked up by a company and pay well but does not stress him/her out?”, but possibly that it was not appropriate to ask. Surely there are jobs which will meet with these criteria. In my growing up days government jobs were considered to meet the above requirements. And, even now many believe this to be true. (For evidence, look at the number of applicants for a few peon positions in the UP government, Railway Recruitment or Nationalized Bank clerical cadre posts, etc.), although it may not be the case at all. Many of the old benefits have disappeared. There are better paying jobs with lesser attached stress in other places.
So, what’s my answer to the question “what is the scope …?” This is a wrong question to begin with. The more appropriate question(s) would be: (1) What will I be good at? (2) What will be the skills I will be taught and what will be the demand / supply situation for these skills in the job market space?
The answer to the first question will be difficult to be answered by a stranger. We need to build systems / processes / experts in high schools for youngsters to get some answers to this question. The answer will have to be built from several parts such as: (i) how much is your focusing capacity (long or short; intense or superficial); (ii) what are your motivations; (iii) is your thinking guided by rules / systems / processes already in place, or do you feel constrained by them; (iv) will you be inclined to move out of these constraints and be comfortable with it. The answer for the second question is strongly influenced by the changing dynamics between established fields, the skills required to prosper in them and the emerging fields and the places where you can get trained. The emerging fields have unpredictable future (in terms of the demand) since they become obsolete at a much faster rate than demands in the established fields. The demands for skills in established fields are more readily predictable, and will require regular replacements with fresh blood. The emerging areas tend to be populated with mostly fresh blood. So, what will happen to the professionals in these areas which tend to become obsolete quickly? Most likely they will adapt to get into some established fields with some cross fertilization of skills from the fields in which they had built up their expertise. Moreover, these emerging fields will get reshaped more frequently that one must expect and be prepared for it; i.e., you will only be partly ready when you leave the program, and must be prepared to further shape yourself for being in a productive career. Sometimes, this uncertainty can be daunting to many people.
Delectable Debates 