A Teenager is Helping Students Decide Alternate Careers

Sachin Rammoorthy, a 17-year-old student from Bengaluru, Karnataka has started a platform where he provides necessary information on alternate career options to the kids across the country. He brings various experts and experienced professionals on board and creates a series of podcasts to answer the queries.

Imagine what if Sachin Tendulkar would have opted a career in engineering instead of cricket or Shah Rukh Khan opted for cricket instead of acting. The world wouldn’t be having a “Master Blaster” and “The King of Romance”.

Everyone is born with something that they have to do and the real challenge is to find out that “something”. There are many students baffled and confused when it comes to making a choice in career. We are privileged to have Doctors and Engineers but not many of us want to be in that profession and that’s when the real struggle begins and to help students out, a 17-year-old boy has come forward with a solution.

Sachin Rammoorthy, a 12th-grade student from Bangalore runs an initiative called “Career Central”, a podcast to answer queries related to career. It is not at all surprising to see students confused and worried in deciding what subjects to take or what majors to look into college and like any other student, Sachin too was in this dilemma.

The only exposure he got was talking to his parents and their friends about their profession and eventually, he realized that everyone has a need for this exposure. So, when he was in 9th grade, he decided to do something about it, and thus came the idea of “Career Central”.

“One of my Dad’s friends chose his career based on the size of the queue of college. One of the colleges had 5 people queue while the other had 20, so he went to the college with 5 people queue because he did not want to wait so long. He joined without even knowing about it and that struck me and I couldn’t help but wonder is this really how people choose their career? Many people don’t know enough and this motivated me to do something about it,” says Sachin

What is Career Central?

“Career Central” is a podcast series, which gives an actual glimpse of various diversified careers. It involves short interviews with professionals of various fields talking about their career like what they do on a daily basis or what is the favourite part of their career etc.

When his initiative was at an initial stage Sachin started reaching out to a lot of professionals via email. He started calling them to ask about their career and then started putting it up online and gradually it gained attraction. From two people visiting the website a day to 1300 a day now.  

Through the podcast, the students can get a glimpse of various career options. They have someone to look upto and can clarify their doubts. It’s really what you see that inspires your idea of what’s possible in the world and in a country like India; we usually don’t get to see many role models for the profession that we want to join and if we see in the rural areas, there are not enough diversified career options available. 

Sachin through his initiative wants to create a choice for the students worldwide.

“As long as one person is affected by this initiative, it makes it worthwhile, career is something which defines a person’s life and that’s what keeps me going,” said Sachin.

Some of the personalities who have appeared on Sachin’s podcasts are Ms. Rujuta Diwekar (celebrity nutritionist), MasterChef Ajay Chopra, former Olympian Ashwini Nachappa, an Israeli Intelligence agent, and more.

The Challenge

The biggest challenge Sachin faced is finding Professionals to feature on the show. In a world full of Doctors and Engineers, it becomes difficult to find Professionals with unique careers. Another challenge is to create awareness of the podcast so that students can have access to it. It is more difficult to reach out to the students from a poor background, who do not have much exposure to various career options available. Presently the podcast is in English language but the challenge is to translate the podcast into multiple languages so that it can reach as many students as possible.

The future

 Sachin, along with his three friends who help him in production and editing, plans to interview as many people as possible from diverse careers. In the next five years, he wants to create 200 episodes so that enough choices can be made available to the students. He also wants to enlist support to cover various roles like dedicated editor, marketer, interviewer etc.

According to a report of India Today, 93 percent of students are aware of just seven career options though there are more than 250 different types of job options available in India. Clearly a lack of information and not having the resources to plan it to the end are the major problems today.

Another report of Economic Times  states that almost 80 percent of Indian engineers are not fit for any job in the knowledge economy. They lack the required skill sets because most of the times students do not have interest in the career they choose.

“People often ask me what is the best career according to you, one person’s favourite career could be other person’s worst career. You can’t say without knowing the person’s interest. Thus, Do what you are interested in and do not follow someone else’s dream,” concludes Sachin.

To explore more about career options, visit indianstudentroom.com

Like this story? Please send us emails and share your views at – contact@thestoriesofchange.com. You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram.

If you like our grassroots journalism and would like to help us in bringing out more such stories of change, please support us here.