Academic Staff College, Shimla is a place where many opportunities are provided to the teaching community to rejuvenate passion for effective teaching. Teaching profession is full of challenges, excitement and intellectual development of each student. In this profession thinking of effective teaching should lead to action. It is rightly said that knowledge without action is useless and irrelevant whereas, knowledge with action brings prosperity. Involvement of Academic Staff College of Himachal Pradesh University has accepted the challenges to update the knowledge of the teaching community with latest methodologies by conducting orientation and refresher courses. Director of ASC, Dr. Yoginder Verma, being a hard task master. He inspires, motivates, encourages participants.

The Academic Staff College had taken care to select the resource persons from diverse fields as the participants belonged to different disciplines. Main focus of the course was to familiarize the participants with various issues related to teaching. To acclimatize the participants with better teaching skills was the prime aim. In this direction lectures delivered by Dr. D.R. Viz, Prof S.L. Sharma, Prof Sagar Sharma, Prof Yoginder Verma, Prof. A.Sethi, Prof Asha Sethi, Dr. Kulwant Pathania Dr. Kiran Rekha, Sh. N.S. Bist, Dr. G.D. Sharma and Dr. Y.K. Sharma proved to be very beneficial in updating knowledge and broadening the vision.

During the orientation course I involved myself in a project on “Career Counseling among Studies” our group discovered startling details after getting a feedback from students. Thus in the first case twenty samples were given the questionnaires which wanted to ascertain the preferences of the individuals regarding their desire for a post in contrast to the post they held currently. Nearly 75 percent of the respondents agreed that they could not get their profession of the choice. Hence their fullest capacity and ability does not find expression in the incumbent post.

Further, to ascertain the relative importance of the environmental factors such as family, peer groups and financial factors in shifting from one career to another. It was found that 60 percent of the respondents gave primacy to family factors for their career shifts, 30 percent to peer group and 10 percent to the financial factors. The impact of the environment in the career choices of students was to be decisive and phenomenon. The group feelt that proper career counselling of the students would have helped them in identifying careers that suited their true potential and ability. It was also noted that 90% of the respondents were in favour of the fact that the career counselling be made an integral part of the academic curriculum.

In order to ascertain the views of the respondents pertaining to the initiation of career counselling, 20 respondents were asked to cast their preferences for it either at the matriculate level, intermediate level or graduation level. Nearly 60 % wanted that career counselling should be introduced at the matriculation level, 30 % wanted it to be incorporated at intermediate level, while only 10 % wanted it to be introduced at graduation level.

At the very level of the initiation of the project, the group consisting of Dr. G. P. Kapoor, Mr. Lalan Kishore Singh and Mr. Arvind Singh was of unanimous opinion that the education curriculum in India is not in a position to sensitize the students of their abilities and potential in the present era. Due to the lack of expert career counseling services very often students turn astray and follows ‘shop’ gossip in choosing their career. This later on induces frustration and inertia as they fail to traverse careers of their choice where their full potential can be exploited. In order to validate its assumption the group undertook an empirical exercise by undertaking sample studies through questionnaires and interviews. The findings clearly stated that career counselling is an essential need of the hour in the present scenario, and that it should be initiated as early as possible may be at the matriculation level. This perhaps can help redeem education to its real and original health.

I should not fail to mention that the excellence of Academic Staff College lies in doing ordinary things in a extraordinary manner. According to ASC, teacher is like a lit candle that emits life by burning himself/herself. It also elucidates that poor teacher tells, an average teacher explains, a good teacher demonstrates and a great teacher inspires. It gave the message to the whole teaching community that the teacher should not rest till the Good becomes the Better and the Better becomes the Best. Staff of ASC remained focused while being sensitive to the problems and the needs of the participants. The hard task master a Power House of Academic Staff College Prof. Yoginder Verma made us work harder and harder, but his smiling face, inspiring voice and commanding presence, extracted the maximum out of each participant. I would like to take this opportunity to suggest the ASC that success is not the destination but it is the beginning of the journey.

Dr. G.P.Kapoor,
Deptt. of Economics (RKMV).