I’ve been traveling across India for the past two weeks—just as I have for the last 15 years—visiting high schools, speaking with students, engaging with counselors, and connecting with school leaders. Every visit reminds me why I do this work: the energy in the auditoriums, the dreams in students’ eyes, and the genuine desire among many educators to help young people succeed.
And yet, despite all the visible progress—the rise of dedicated counseling departments, the integration of career fairs and workshops, and a growing awareness of global opportunities—I can’t shake a persistent feeling: our students are still operating within an outdated framework when it comes to their futures.
Career conversations are still driven by societal expectations, not student potential. Students are guided by what their parents know—not by what the world needs. And parents, though well-meaning, continue to lean into the familiar: doctor, engineer, lawyer, accountant. This isn’t because they lack ambition—it’s because they lack awareness of just how much the world of work has evolved.
Take this common refrain: “Oh, you like math? You should become an engineer.”
Or this one: “You enjoy drawing? That’s a nice hobby, but what about something more practical?”
These comments aren’t meant to limit—but they do. They shrink the possibilities of what a student can imagine, boxing them into careers that align more with cultural comfort than global relevance.
The problem isn’t that students lack interests—it’s that they lack the opportunity to connect those interests to the evolving world of work. And that’s where our current systems fall short.
Math doesn’t only lead to engineering. It can lead to cryptography, supply chain optimization, behavioral economics, or AI ethics. Art isn’t just a hobby—it’s foundational to design thinking, user experience, animation, and even data visualization.
Yet we’ve turned college and career guidance into a funnel: spot an interest, push it into a fixed path, and move on. In doing so, we skip the most important step— deepening the interest . Helping students explore why they like something. Connecting that curiosity to real-world challenges. Helping them understand the many different directions a subject can take—and the kinds of problems it might empower them to solve.
In many schools, counseling comes too late— if it comes at all. Counselors often enter the picture in grades 11 or 12, just as decisions need to be made and deadlines loom. Instead of being architects of exploration, they’re cast as project managers—coordinating applications, organizing university visits, and keeping timelines on track. The administrative burden leaves little room for the deeper conversations students need and deserve.
Adding to the challenge, the structure surrounding college and career counseling has, in many cases, become performative. University representatives, eager for visibility and student referrals, often focus more on courting counselors than on student outcomes. The result? Counselors are showered with attention, perks, and praise—not for their insights, but for their access. In this dynamic, they become gatekeepers—not by intention, but by design.
It’s a system that prioritizes gatekeeping over guidance, influence over insight, visibility over value.
This isn’t a critique of counselors—it’s a recognition of their constraints. Many are deeply committed but operate within a framework that makes it nearly impossible to do the kind of sustained, future-facing work students need.
In response, several well-meaning organizations have stepped in with certifications and short-term training programs aimed at “building capacity.” But these efforts, while noble, often scratch the surface. They equip counselors to manage processes—not to lead paradigm shifts.
What we need now isn’t more process experts—we need futures thinkers.
And in the search for those thinkers, we’ve consistently overlooked some of the most powerful influences in a student’s life: teachers.
Teachers—the very people who interact with students every day, who witness their curiosity unfold in real time—are left out of the conversation. They see students earlier. They see them longer. They understand their strengths, observe their struggles, and are often the first to recognize hidden talents or unspoken fears. They’re the ones who hear the questions after class, who see the spark during a project, who notice the emerging interest before it even becomes conscious.
We just haven’t engaged them—yet. Imagine if we gave them the language, tools, and structure to nurture those sparks into something more.
So here’s my proposal: we start with teachers.
Not to turn them into traditional counselors, but to equip and empower them as career influencers. We give them the tools, training, and trust to help students explore, question, and imagine. We integrate career thinking into subject learning. We create time and space for reflection, curiosity, and conversation in classrooms. We tap into the people students respect most and spend the most time with—and make them the catalysts for change.
So why haven’t we involved teachers in a more intentional way?
Part of it is structural—teachers are already stretched thin. Their primary responsibility is content delivery and academic outcomes, and in most school systems, career readiness isn’t seen as part of their job description. They aren’t asked to think beyond the syllabus, let alone connect their subject matter to the world of work.
Part of it is cultural—we’ve come to believe that “counseling” is the domain of a single expert, rather than a shared, school-wide responsibility. We’ve compartmentalized guidance into a department instead of cultivating it as a culture.
And part of it is simply oversight. No one has stopped to ask: What if the most consistent, trusted adults in a student’s life are the very people best positioned to influence their future thinking?
It’s time we ask that question. And more importantly—it’s time we act on it.
A Plan to Empower Teachers as Career Influencers
- Reframe Their Role
Let’s shift the narrative. Teachers don’t need to become counselors—but they can become career influencers. That means recognizing and encouraging them to integrate real-world relevance and career connections into their everyday teaching. - Build Career Literacy into Subjects
Provide teachers with tools and frameworks to connect subject matter to emerging fields and industries. A math teacher could introduce how statistics is used in sports analytics. A literature teacher might explore narrative in brand storytelling. A biology teacher could discuss careers in environmental health. This doesn’t require more teaching—just more intentional framing. - Offer Targeted Micro-Training
Develop brief, subject-specific modules that show teachers how to bring career relevance into their curriculum. These should be easy to implement, time-efficient, and practical—because the goal is to complement their work, not add to it. - Create Collaborative Ecosystems
Facilitate structures where teachers and counselors meet regularly to share observations, align on student development goals, and build a more cohesive guidance strategy. This kind of collaboration can surface patterns and opportunities that would otherwise go unnoticed. - Recognize and Celebrate Teacher Contributions
Schools should build formal mechanisms to acknowledge teachers who nurture student interest in future pathways—through mentorship, project-based learning, or meaningful subject integration. Guidance isn’t a department; it’s a shared success story.
The goal isn’t to replace counselors. It’s to support them by widening the circle of influence. To give students more touchpoints, more moments of clarity, more nudges in the right direction—early, often, and in the places they spend most of their time: classrooms.
If we truly want students to be future-ready, we can’t wait until the final years of school to start talking about careers. We must begin earlier, think broader, and act more inclusively.
Counseling isn’t broken—it’s just incomplete.
Ex Cogitatione, Progressus
Girish
