Career guidance begins at home

Fredrick Qaphelani Mabikwa, [email protected]

RECENTLY, a friend requested me to have a talk with his son, who he said was playing truant at school and his latest report card was not pleasing.

 The boy is doing O-level.

 He said that the boy was hanging around with the wrong friends and suspected that he might also be experimenting with drugs and alcohol. 

May I say, I had a very interesting discussion with the boy and I discovered that he wasn’t a bad boy after all. 

It is natural for parents to suspect the worst when not-so-big issues have happened with a child. 

Many reasons might have led to the boy’s truancy. I will not dwell on these in this article, I will dwell on career guidance. 

I made what I thought was a fairly big discovery with the boy’s education. I discussed the boy’s likes and dislikes in school, sports, friends and all. When I came to career, the boy said he was not yet sure about what he wanted to do.

He was honest enough to say he wasn’t very much motivated to learn mainly because he had no push to propel him to land a certain career. 

What was surprising, if not shocking, was that at 17, the boy was clueless about what he wanted to do with his life. I didn’t rush to blame the boy but I asked myself, “Do we still have career guidance at the family level, at our schools and beyond the schools? I think the honest truth is that career guidance for our children is poor at most levels, especially at family level.

Growing up in the high-density suburb of Mambo Township in Gweru, I remember very vividly in Grade Seven at Sandara Primary School, attending a career day. This was a day I think was organised by the Ministry of Education if my memory is not betraying me.

 Schools would flock to a central venue where we did walk-around career guidance for grades seven and high school students. 

Almost all big employers at the national level would come and have a stand that spoke to who they were and their employment opportunities. The career day took the form of the Trade Fair (ZITF) where we would walk around the stands of these prospective employers gathering information on career prospects. I remember we had Teachers’ Colleges, the Polytechnics, factories, the Zimbabwe National Army, the Police, the Air Force of Zimbabwe, the National Railways of Zimbabwe (NRZ), hospitals, to mention a few. This was a very good arrangement.

 When I was doing A-level at Fletcher High School, I remember the University of Zimbabwe (UZ), being the only university in the country then, would have an open day attended by A-level schools and students were taken through careers the UZ offered. The open day was an annual event. Just attending the open day at the UZ Campus was enough motivation for some of us to qualify to study there. We nicknamed the UZ “kwaKamba/KoKamba” from the name of the then Vice-Chancellor Professor Walter Kamba, now late. We knew the Vice-Chancellor before we even went there. Now our students at our local universities don’t know their Vice-Chancellors. 

I was doing induction of student interns at my workplace recently and I was shocked to learn that some of our students spend the entire four years at a university and they leave without knowing who the Vice-Chancellor of the university is. This is just like a student at a school who doesn’t know their headmaster. We bemoan the death of the motivation to learn in our children.

I am, however, happy that in the months of March/April last year, there were career guidance days in selected schools around Bulawayo, both primary and secondary schools. This was organised by the Ministry of Public Service, Labour and Social Welfare, Department of Employment Services and Promotion, Bulawayo, in partnership with the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education. I want to commend this ministry and would like to call upon school authorities to allow students to attend these career guidance days they are very critical. 

Nature dictates that when one sets out on a journey and they know where they are going, they prepare and are motivated to embark on the journey. They undertake the journey with ease and confidence because they know where they are going. The same is true for careers, a student who knows what they are studying for is motivated to learn and achieve their goals. They have a dream, they have a vision and it is that dream, that vision that is the motivator for serious study.

Charity, they say, begins at home and so is career guidance. As parents, how much career guidance are we giving our children or do we leave it to fate and teachers? As parents we know our children, we see what they are crafted for as they grow up. We have a rough idea of what they can and cannot do because we watch and observe them as they grow up. 

When is the right time to start to talk about careers? I would honestly say as early as the child starts to show interest in careers because children mature differently. I have a classic example of my sister-in-law who told everyone she wanted to be a nurse when she was in primary school and today, she is indeed a nurse. I would however, say that by the time a child gets to grade seven, informal career discussions should have already started at home. Yes, in infancy they have a shallow appreciation of careers and will talk about being doctors, teachers, nurses, pilots and all these professionals they see around them every day. 

However, as they grow up into high school, their horizons broaden and they start to see more careers around them. From the perspective of the Zimbabwe education system, high school is a crucial time for career development because when they go into Form Three, they are then placed in classes according to their abilities. They are placed into the three major domains of study, the pure Sciences, Commercials and Arts and Humanities. This is the stage when most careers are cut out.

When we say career guidance, what exactly are we talking about? We are certainly not talking about choosing careers for our children which unfortunately some of us parents have done. The word “guidance” refers to a process of directing conduct. Career guidance is therefore a comprehensive, developmental programme designed to assist individuals, in this case students in making informed career choices. It is an act of exposing the student to the world of careers, exposing them to what is available and then they can make informed choices. Many a student end up settling for common careers because they have not been exposed to wider career choices.

An informed career guide makes one aware of the scope of every career option in detail, which widens the horizon for the student. The student however, needs to be made aware of what they can possibly do and cannot do. There is therefore need for the parent to work very closely with the school in helping the student make an informed decision. 

There could be a mismatch between ability and choice of career. A student who struggles in Maths and Science wants to do medicine. They have to be kindly advised to rethink their career path given their strengths in their subject areas. As a parent and in consultation with the teachers, you need to help the student realise which of the three domains of study they belong to, the Sciences, the Commercials or the Arts and Humanities. The gifted students will be all-rounders and excel in all three domains but at the end of the day, they have to settle for a career path as well. Parents should assist their children in going to universities’ websites, looking at what careers are on offer and asking questions about areas they don’t understand. Careers are not only resident in universities. For example in Accounting and Finance, some professional bodies offer careers directly. There is a need to research with these professional bodies.

The Polytechnics have a very wide range of trades which can be explored. Working with student attachees and interns, I realised that most of those students who passed through the Polytechnics are more hands-on than most of our direct imports from some universities. 

There is a general misguided propensity by parents to look down upon the very strong courses that our Polytechnics offer. Careers are not all about degrees. Most Poly graduates can survive with or without formal employment because they have been trained to make and provide goods and services, not just theory. After their National Diploma (ND) the students can then enrol into universities through the special entry route if they so wish.

Career guidance is not all about degrees and diplomas. Some students are cut out for non-academic careers like entrepreneurship, sport, music, dancing, arts, crafts, farming and other such trades. I will dwell on these in my next article.

May I conclude by sending a word to parents? Career guidance just like charity, it begins at home. Not all schools will assist your child to start thinking about a career path. The schools will only teach. Some of these schools have become so commercialised that even at A-level they will give your child strange subject combinations leading to no particular career path. As parents, you just pride yourself in the fact that your child is doing A-level. A-level “yes” but the million-dollar question is to do what? I just realised that career guidance has become so thin around our children that if we do not assist them to start thinking about careers at an early stage, they will go to school just for the sake of it, with zero motivation to learn because of lack of a vision driven by the pursuit of a career.