Students look beyond conventional careers

PUNE: “I was really disappointed when I did not crack the medical entrance examinations, but now I have learnt that there are so many options for me within the healthcare sector itself and I can pursue one of them instead,” said a visitor to The Times of India’s Mission Admission event here on Tuesday.
He was speaking about the session on healthcare organized during the day which gave the audience an overview of the several options available to students beyond the MBBS route.
From careers in sports management to options in design, students were introduced to several opportunities that many of them hadn’t considered so far.
“There is a lack of sporting infrastructure in our country, but it is not limited to physical infrastructure. There aren’t many trained in specialized aspects of managing sports and at the moment this need is being filled very haphazardly,” said Kunal Agarwal, director of city-based football club Bharat FC.
He pointed out several aspects of sports management from coaching, sports psychology and physiotherapy to other aspects like ground curations and legal issues. “For now we have to rely on employing people from abroad to fill this need, but ideally we would like to employ people in India to do it,” Agarwal said, adding that the club was trying to set up an institute for such aspects.
Mangesh Panditrao, CEO and founder of Shoptimize, commented on the fact that formal education does not cover an emerging sector like e-commerce, but asked students to turn this into a learning opportunity. “It is a level playing field out there. No one can tell you I have 20 years of experience and this is how it is done,” he said adding that since most of the learning is on-the-job they should take up internships.
He pointed out that most of the people he hired didn’t know anything about e-commerce when they joined. His advice to parents was to build a habit of continuously learning and not limit their children to “getting into the right institute”.
Vimmi Deshpande, general manager of Kuoni Academy, gave an overview of career options available in the travel and tourism industry. “About 80% of the people working in the travel and tourism industry are very young. The kinds of experience professionals in the travel and tourism sector create for people visiting India will go a long way in shaping the way they feel about the country,” she said.
She also had some practical advice. Many degree courses in travel and tourism do not have a great placement record she pointed out, asking aspirants to enrol in vocational courses or internships while pursuing their graduation.