CAREER DEVELOPMENT SUPPORT FOR YOUTHS: THE MALAWI SITUATION

In the early days of school life, children are often asked this familiar question: ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’ Among the most common answers one expects to hear include ‘I want to be… a doctor, a teacher, a soldier or a lawyer.’ To most children, these are some of the most familiar careers.  This reflects the prevailing practice and mentality in our society that when one grows up, he or she should be employed. Career sayings such as the ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’ seem to cement such attitude. It is, perhaps high time we de-emphasized this narrow sense of ‘employment’ in our early career mentorship of our children. That way, our children will purposely begin to accumulate skills that they will use in ‘work for others’ or ‘work for self’ future scenarios.

Developing a career is a long process and it has to begin when children are at a small age. As defined by the Cambridge Advanced Learners Dictionary (3^rd edition), a career is ‘the job or series of jobs that you do during your working life….’ Defined this way, you do not expect choice of a career to be made when one is already at working age. It means that career development service (CDS) has to be part and parcel of the overall national youth development framework with government playing a central role through strategizing, planning, and resourcing. Malawi’s Gross Domestic Product depends largely on agriculture. It, therefore, makes more sense for the government to help promote skills among its citizens that are going to directly or indirectly make an impact in this important sector of the economy. A robust CDS is, therefore, very crucial if most of our youths are going to be part and parcel of the building of a strong economy in the future.  

On the ground, however, national career development service is in a state of disorganization. A recent survey by the Skills and Technical Education Programme (STEP) found that among others, identified the following gaps: lack of national CDS policy or strategy, lack of national CDS programme, rare, ad-hoc and uncoordinated CDS initiatives by some organizations, and lack of CDS materials. Lack of national CDS coordination means that there is no regulation a thing likely to compromise standards of delivery, monitoring, and evaluation. The cost of this is very high. Many youths don’t have sufficient knowledge about various careers let alone paths to follow towards professions that appropriately align with their soft as well as technical skills. In the end, the majority find themselves in particular careers out of convenience and without a thorough preparatory development process a thing that creates a mismatch between one’s skills and the chosen career. We cannot expect maximum productivity from such a combination. That is why the government has to take a lead in nationalizing CDS and supporting it with an appropriate policy framework.