Career Conversations That Are Not Just About Marks

By Rekha Bose, Career Development Researcher and School Counsellor Educator

Key facts

• Most career counselling in Indian schools reduces to “get good marks and your options will be open,” a message that offers no actual career guidance.
• Research on career development and school-based career education offers a far more specific and usable alternative, built around exploration and self-knowledge rather than marks alone.
• NEP 2020, NCF 2023, and the NIPUN Bharat foundational literacy mission all point toward career guidance that starts earlier and goes deeper than marks-based advice.
• Free classroom resources: NIPUN Bharat FLN assessment tools (through your SCERT or DIET), NCERT teacher guides, Azim Premji Foundation’s open-access research, and DIKSHA platform content in 36 languages.
• Support for teachers: KIRAN mental health helpline (1800-599-0019), Tele-MANAS (14416), CHILDLINE (1098).

Most career counselling in Indian schools consists of “get good marks and your options will be open.” That advice is not wrong, exactly, but it is not guidance either: it tells a student what to optimise for without telling her anything about what she is optimising toward. Research on career development and school-based career education offers something far more useful, and far more specific, than keeping every door open in the abstract.

What the research actually says

Indian teachers already sense that the research on career development is more specific and more useful than most professional development programmes suggest; it just rarely gets said aloud in a staffroom. The evidence here draws on ASER survey data, Azim Premji Foundation field studies, NCERT curriculum research, government programme evaluations, and peer-reviewed work conducted in government and private secondary schools. Where international evidence is used elsewhere in this field, it needs to be flagged explicitly and checked against Indian classroom conditions before it is applied here.

This is not an essay about education in Singapore or Finland, translated awkwardly into an Indian setting. It is written specifically for secondary teachers, because the specific pressure of board exam years, when career conversations tend to collapse into stream selection and marks targets, is different from the general challenges of teaching a subject.

A teacher who genuinely cares can still make a problem worse by misunderstanding its mechanism. Understanding the mechanism is what turns sincere care into effective care.

Good intentions are not sufficient on their own. A teacher who tells a student to “keep your options open” by maximising marks, out of a genuine wish to protect her future, gives that student a strategy with no destination attached. Research on career development finds that students benefit far more from structured exploration, actually finding out what different fields involve, than from a marks target that defers the real decision indefinitely. The gap between wanting to protect a student’s options and actually helping her understand what those options are is where the practical work below sits.

Five principles for applying this in your classroom

Five principles recur across the research on career development in Indian classrooms, and they hold up across streams and school types.

1. Diagnose before you prescribe. The most common reason a well-designed career conversation fails is that it treats a general problem without identifying its specific form. A student who is unsure because she hasn’t been exposed to enough options needs a different response than a student who has a strong interest but has been told it isn’t a “safe” choice. Naming which one you are looking at comes before choosing what to do about it.

2. Build the relationship before you build the instruction. Across reading development, behaviour management, and academic achievement, the quality of the teacher-student relationship is consistently reported as a major factor in how well any given approach performs. A student is far more likely to name a real interest, rather than a socially safe answer, to a teacher she trusts than to one running through a standard checklist.

3. Trust evidence over intuition, especially your own. Teachers develop strong, often accurate instincts about their students. But those instincts run into predictable blind spots: assuming a high-marks student has clarity about her direction simply because she performs well academically, underestimating how much individual variation in exposure to different careers sits inside one classroom, and mistaking a confident answer for a considered one. A short, specific conversation about what a student actually knows about a field she names corrects these blind spots faster than assuming.

4. Treat the community as a resource, not a constraint. Indian secondary schools often position the teacher as the sole source of career guidance and everything else, working professionals, alumni, family, as a distraction from board exam preparation. Flip that: the teacher is the person who can connect a student to someone actually working in a field she’s curious about, which does more for career clarity than another motivational talk about keeping options open.

5. Design for sustainable practice. An intervention that only works because a teacher personally researches every student’s field of interest and arranges every conversation herself is not a sustainable intervention. It is debt against next term. Whatever you take from this piece, a standing list of alumni willing to talk to students, a habit of asking what a student actually knows about a field before advising her on it, should be small enough to still be running in March.

Where this fits Indian education policy

NEP 2020, NCF 2023, and the NIPUN Bharat mission all point in the direction this research supports: career guidance that starts earlier, goes beyond marks, and gives students structured exposure to real options rather than an abstract instruction to keep performing well. The gap between that policy direction and what actually happens on a Tuesday morning, when a student asks a teacher what she should do after Class X, is the space this piece is trying to close. It is not an argument for a new policy. It is guidance for the teacher who is already having that conversation, deciding what to say next.

Frequently asked questions

Why isn’t “keep your marks up and your options will stay open” good enough advice? It defers the actual decision rather than informing it. A student with excellent marks and no exposure to what different careers actually involve is not better positioned to choose than a student with average marks who has explored several fields; she simply has more doors to choose blindly between.

What does structured career exploration look like in a school without dedicated counselling staff? It can be as simple as connecting students with alumni or local professionals willing to describe their day-to-day work, assigning a short research task on a field a student names as interesting, or setting aside class time for students to ask a visiting professional direct questions.

How should a teacher respond when a student’s stated interest isn’t considered a “safe” career path by the family? The research points toward helping the student understand the field accurately, including its realistic prospects and trade-offs, rather than either dismissing the interest or promoting it uncritically; an informed conversation serves the student better than either extreme.

Where can a teacher find state-specific material on this? Start with your SCERT or DIET for NIPUN Bharat FLN assessment tools, NCERT’s teacher guides, Azim Premji Foundation’s open-access publications, and DIKSHA, which carries content in 36 languages. If nothing exists for your specific state and grade, that gap is itself worth reporting to your Block Resource Coordinator.

What to do:

• Name one child in your class who is most affected by how career conversations are currently handled, and write down one specific thing you will try differently for that child this week. Not a general improvement: a named action for a named child.
• Search DIKSHA or ask your Block Resource Coordinator for any resource specific to this topic in your state’s context. If nothing exists, note that and report it. The gap in resources is itself useful information.
• Spend five minutes this week just observing one aspect of your classroom related to this, not teaching, just watching and noting. What you notice while only watching is different from what you notice while teaching.
• Tell one colleague one specific finding from this piece this week. Explaining it will sharpen your own understanding, and it may start a conversation that helps more than any single action.
• At the end of the week, ask yourself what you will do differently next week because of this, and what you will look for to know whether it worked.

Support resources for teachers: NIPUN Bharat FLN assessment tools (via your SCERT or DIET), NCERT teacher guides, Azim Premji Foundation open-access research, DIKSHA (36 languages), KIRAN mental health helpline (1800-599-0019), Tele-MANAS (14416), CHILDLINE (1098).