World of Work in Rajasthan.
For many years, Rajasthan has been facing the issue of unemployment. While the schools provide formal education, neither the schools nor the curriculum prepare students for the reality of seeking employment after education. Direct and concrete sources of information around career opportunities and how to best choose a career based on individual traits is missing from our students’ lives.
The ‘World of Work’ is a series of films made to address a part of this gap. This series aims to disseminate information on various formal-informal sector employment opportunities that are relevant in the context and geography of our students. School students don’t often get the opportunity to meet professionals from varied fields and bluntly ask what it takes to get a job like that and how a choice like that would work for them. So we did just that for them.
In the first three films of the series made by us, we covered occupations like social worker, counsellor, mason or construction worker. Successful professionals featured in this film — their personal, financial and social contexts are similar to those of the students we work with. Every one of these professionals have a story of struggle that they overcame. We are hoping our students too are inspired to pursue higher education or employment more suited to them in spite of the struggles they may face.
Dinesh Agarwal, a social worker from Rajasthan, guiding his colleagues.
The professions we’ve chosen to coven so far have been fairly unconventional. We are hoping to get our students to realise that there are many options out there that they haven’t yet considered.
While shooting with a social worker in Churu district of Rajasthan, we learnt the range of activities of a social worker, especially their work in the education sector and the importance of their presence in the sector. This attempt at making a movie on social workers seeks to show the behaviour of helping others within the social context, devotion to work and its ethics, knowledge of social service and its delivery system and the ability to make sense of vast knowledge.
In the film, we showed students the employment opportunities in social work. We were excited to make videos on regional issues and handle them through the value education module. Education on ‘world of work’ will hopefully be recognised as an element of development and also be considered a vital input in skills, habits, values, attitudes and understanding of various types of employment and their availability.
Shiva Thorat, Assistant Media Producer, and Gitanjali Somanathan, Senior Production Associate, Production team, CLIx
