CHENNAI, SEPTEMBER 24: Students should focus on flexibility, experimentation and the ability to adapt rather than trying to identify a “perfect” or “safe” career at an early age, Member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister Sanjeev Sanyal said during a podcast hosted by IIT Madras faculty member Prof Mahesh Panchagnula.
Speaking on ‘The Prof. Mahesh Podcast’, Sanyal discussed career choices, uncertainty, entrepreneurship, parental expectations and the impact of artificial intelligence on jobs and higher education.
According to an official spokesperson of IIT Madras, Sanyal said career decisions are made in conditions of uncertainty, where future outcomes cannot always be predicted or assigned reliable probabilities. He argued that young people should therefore avoid treating an early career decision as a permanent choice.
“I am actually playing on flexibility more than on direction,” Sanyal said, explaining his approach to career decisions.
Drawing on his own career, which took him from economics at Shri Ram College and the University of Delhi to Oxford, financial markets, writing and public policy, Sanyal said his path was not the result of a predetermined plan. Instead, he focused at different stages on eliminating options he did not want to pursue while remaining open to where his choices might lead.
He also stressed persistence, saying that careers inevitably involve difficult and mundane periods and that students should consider whether they can continue through such phases.
On the pressure to discover a lifelong “passion”, Sanyal said asking an 18-year-old to identify a single passion could create an unnecessary burden. Young people, he said, have limited exposure to the range of opportunities available to them and should be encouraged to experiment, try different activities and eliminate paths they do not enjoy.
The discussion also examined the changing nature of work in the age of AI. Sanyal cautioned against assuming that experts can accurately predict how artificial intelligence will affect jobs and industries several years from now. Drawing on the experience of earlier transformative technologies, he noted that technological developments can produce consequences that were not anticipated by their creators.
He argued that instead of attempting to predict every impact of AI, individuals and institutions should build the capacity to adapt as technology changes.
This could also reshape higher education, Sanyal said, suggesting that universities may increasingly need to support people returning to formal education at different stages of their careers rather than concentrating most education within the traditional 18–22 age bracket.
The podcast, hosted by Prof Mahesh Panchagnula, Alumni Community Chair Professor in the Department of Applied Mechanics and Biomedical Engineering, is supported by the Center for Outreach and Digital Education (CODE), IIT Madras. It aims to help students and parents understand changing career opportunities, emerging professions, innovation and entrepreneurship.
Episodes and related clips are being made available through digital platforms, with summaries intended to improve access in English, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu.
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