Product Back-tracing: Products and Careers
The GDP (Gross Domestic Product) is generally accepted as a measure of the economic health of a country. Increase in GDP of a nation signifies that it is creating more value-added services and goods. On the one hand, GDP indicates the nation’s power to generate income, on the other hand, it also signifies spending by country’s population. A GDP increase indicates 1) more income being generated, 2) more people working to generate this income, 3) more value-added products and services. In essence, GDP gives a sense of the health of employment, skilled labour, and the occupations of a nation.
Let’s look at goods as well as services from the ‘Value add’ point of view. Services involve work or consultation that is performed by a professional and the consumer is the direct recipient of the outcome. The consumer feels the ‘value-add’ because of the knowledge, skill, and effort of the professional rendering the service. In the case of products, an end consumer senses the ‘value-addition’ because of the reduced cost, time, complexity, or effort, to perform a task by using the products either directly or directly. Both services and products usually come together in a given sector to give us improved comfort, safety, security, etc. E.g., police force as a service and an explosive detector as a product together play a key role to improve our security.
In any Career Cluster, multiple careers combine to contribute services and products to society. The ratio of services to products varies from cluster to cluster. Among them, some careers are easily visible to the common man as a direct consumer, especially service-related careers such as a teacher or nurse. However, for a product, the contribution of several careers is often invisible, especially when there is no direct ‘touch and feel’– e.g., an Earth Mover or a semi-conductor device.
Understanding this ‘value’ creation by products / services, and the importance of those delivering it seems like common sense. However, we often do not give deeper thought to the sheer number of careers involved, especially when it comes to products. How often do we pause to think how many careers played their part while savouring a package of flavoured milk? Have we thought deeply while reading the newspaper every morning, how many careers contributed to its flawless delivery at our doorstep by dawn? Who are the people who contribute to the huge machinery forming the backbone to ‘metro line’ projects? While popping a medicine, do we think about what materials go into its production, or that of the wrapper which gives it a longer shelf life?
Attempts to find answers to the above questions tell us that there is significant work that happens before a product reaches our hands and many careers are involved in its creation – be it procuring and preparing raw materials, production of the core content, packaging, delivery of the product to our doorstep or a distribution chain. Looking at a simple thing such as a pack of biscuits, we can list several things that go into its making, packaging, marketing, transporting, and the roles of different careers such as farmer, dairy farmer, food technologist, polymer chemist, brand designer, engineers who make assembly line machinery, sales and marketing, quality control like FSSAI, and so on.
Often, a student’s career awareness and career exploration efforts are limited by his/her exposure only to front end careers and the careers pursued by people around them. This lack of knowledge leads to biases, misconceptions, and myopic career selection. Students might have aptitude and interest to pursue many careers that are invisible in their lives.
Dear young adults, you are on the threshold of a rewarding work life! Why not attempt ‘product back tracing’ of the goods or services you commonly consume, and list the careers involved in producing them? You may end up with a lot more careers in your short list than you have!!
