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Many students choose careers based on marks and perception, not real exposure. The lack of understanding of what professionals actually do creates a silent skill gap.
Many students choose careers based on perception and exam scores rather than understanding what professionals actually do.
By Kushal Raj Chakravorty
Every year millions of students make a defining choice in their life: choosing a career path. This decision-making may appear to take place in a single year, but its preparation begins much early. Students begin making these decisions as early as 11th standard, while they choose their academic streams. Many of them begin preparing for competitive exams while still in school, and others make this decision after Grade 12, while transitioning into higher education. Here, they commit to a particular field like engineering, medicine, law, commerce and so on. For a large number of students in India this happens against huge loans.
And yet, an alarming number of students have never actually seen what a typical day in the life of these professionals would actually look like. This is a silent skill gap. It does not stem from lack of ambition or intelligence, but a lack of opportunity and exposure.
For most students, careers are defined by societal expectations, prestige and importantly, their performance in exams. Growing up, it is often assumed that a student who scores well in mathematics must opt for engineering, and a student scoring well in biology should become a doctor. They rarely get the opportunity to answer a simple yet integral question: do you know what the work actually involves?
The students lack simple knowledge of that a typical day in the life of a professional looks like. We tend to assume that we know what different professionals do at their work by the simple outcomes or what we hear about them. We rarely pause to really think about the work that they do each day.
What does a day look like for a civil engineer working on infrastructure projects? How much of time a doctor’s spends on paperwork or hospital systems, than direct patient interaction? What does the routine of a software developer look like once the excitement of learning to code turns into maintaining large systems and meeting deadlines? Without this understanding, many students end up choosing a profession based on what they believe the role represents, rather than what the role actually demands.
The problem arises when this realisation arrives, often late and unprepared. The realisation of choosing the image of the profession instead of the profession itself. Some students discover during their higher education that the field they chose does not align with their interests. Others enter the workforce only to find that the skills required in their profession are very different from what they had anticipated. This takes shape of a skill issue between education and employment. A major part of the challenge begins much earlier, as students lack awareness and knowledge of what different careers offer and involve.
For students coming from underserved communities, this gap is even wider. Many are first generation learners, the first in their families to complete formal education, subsequently limiting their opportunities to interact with professionals or understand different industries. As a result, their aspirations are shaped by what students hear about professions rather than their own agency.
This makes exposure of students to different opportunities even more important. When students are given the opportunity to interact with professionals, explore different environments of learning and working, and understand how different industries function, the skill gap shrinks and careers start taking shape.
(The author is the Founder at Lotus Petal Foundation. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author.)
March 12, 2026, 18:36 IST
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