The choice of careers and their development is a universal life-long concern of every thinking youth and enlightened citizen, a concern left to the sole disposal of an individual's personal decision. It is a concern every school and college should have adopted long ago, as their key objective is to become the foremost agenda of every community and government, but is now nobody's agenda. The consequence: the crisis of career dangling like a Damocles' sword over all of us that hardly anyone notices.

The contrast between the ways the prevailing mode of education disappoints and the hopes that a recharged education would raise could hardly be starker. From a land where schools were once as rare as snakes in Iceland, it is hard to come across a village today without a school. But the other side of the picture could hardly be uglier. Adolescents abandon study to grow up as rebels, dons, or drug addicts as a generation lost to the land or become party cadres to pursue power. Soldiers, whose combat efficiency and martial valour have earned fame of epic proportions, have been escaping abroad for over a century to die unmourned, unnoticed, and brain and brawn drain are driving youths away at the prime of their life in droves every day. If this is not a national crisis, what is?

All of this could explain the conundrum we are now facing in education. If you ask children at school today what they want to become when they grow up, their response could leave you speechless. Ask adolescents what their aim in life is: they will scrawl out a whole page of essay on My Aim in Life (MAIL). Pose that question to a youth and you confront a puzzled face. And, if you ask professionals whether they are happy in their professions, be not surprised to see faces arrayed in utter embarrassment.

Today, when the world stands at the cusp of a digital revolution and exploding Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Science and Technology are in a position to make the whole of humankind prosperous and happy, why this spiral of rising aspirations and spiking embarrassment?

One explanation could be the ever-rising gap between the leaps science and technology are making and the hesitant pace of our social evaluation that limps and crawls. A closer look at the predicament, however, will reveal three paradoxes that stare at us all: Poverty of mind in the midst of plenty of resources; a chronic career crisis in a sea of limitless opportunities; and the vital role of careers in a nation's development in contrast to the vulnerable position to which it has been left.

What could explain the mass predicament? One explanation could be the lack of a clear vision to guide the nation's development process. Just as without a map in hand, a search for a treasure becomes an exercise in absurdity, the absence of visionary education on careers will turn planning futile, even sterile. Trying to resolve the career crisis randomly is likely to land us into a maze of baffling complexity. Failures of the NDS (National Development Service) and NESP (New Education System Plan) teach us that we change not just by what we pledge and declare, but by what we do in all seriousness to become. That process of becoming demands investment at three levels – personal, corporate, and state mode –cautiously, continuously, and cumulatively to produce the output (robust careers) and the outcome (national development). It is an investment that has never been made. Why? Because it is a complex delicate process where what matters is not just what we invest, but also Where, How, Why, When, and with What kind of result. In short, a mega-agenda that, sadly, nobody has seriously considered and given thought to so far, let alone take it up.

A second explanation is a corollary of the point just made – the misperceived choice made in education planning. Educating citizens for a robust career unfortunately never got the attention it deserves in the planning history of this land; it was taken for granted. That certified graduation is the ultimate responsibility of educating agencies is a myth, and the point is not just to blow it; the point is to change the mal-conceived outlook on career-building that leaves the whole onus on individuals' own efforts which amounts to total abdication of institutions' responsibility. The stake here is not just the issue of personal careers, but also the problem of 'career equity' of whole communities and regions long left disabled with scarce access to opportunities.

The toll that the large turnover in careers is now taking, the trauma that deviations in careers bring, and the huge shortfall in the country's GDP career deficit is causing every year can be imagined but is neither easy to address nor is it a quick-fix agenda. The risk misplanning hides and the pitfalls unplanned or underplanned careers produce are too familiar and many. After acquiring two doctorates Albert Schweitzer joined medicine as his goal of life at 27 and ended winning a Nobel award for Peace. Freddy, the pilot brother, says U.S. President Donald Trump, died in depression at 43, from family neglect. Then there is the melodramatic end of the daughter in Hatter's Castle. a lesson on how a budding child talent perishes under the unyielding demands of an unthinking father.

The proposal on career building, acronymed MAIL, has four objectives before it: Open up and broaden the scope in career opportunities; minimize career inequity; enhance the capability of students in making the right career choice by facilitating and monitoring that process; and optimise the potentials of professionals to contribute to the nation's development. Achieving these objectives demands a robust strategic package to recharge investment (through the right kind of policies and adequate financial inputs), set up an R&D unit, and establish a Career Counseling Centre.

That the crisis of careers is here for all to see is clear, and one which recalls what Meiser Eckhart, a 14th century mystic, said so aptly:

'The achievement can never be small,

If the aim is great.

And the achievement can never be great,

If the aim is small.'