Not the first offer. The right one.Not the first offer. The right one.

Googling at home.

“I’m basically an engineering graduate,” Sivasundari Vijayakumar says. She tried a few companies after her degree and was not placed in any of the software firms. The thought of starting a teaching profession came later, after her younger son’s birth. She went into Suraasa, she says, believing it would take her to her next level.

She warns other teachers against trying to get there alone. “Sitting at home and searching, googling and seeing the video, it will not work. You will end up in migraine,” she says. “That happened for me.” She does not think a shortage of jobs is the problem. “Right now in my school, we have vacancies,” she says, and there are people searching for work. Skills need improving, she agrees, but something else is missing. “We need someone to guide us rightly.”

Told not to take it.

She asked Suraasa’s placement team for help and told them, “India is my first preference.” They pointed her to her profile and the boosting employability module, and she got on with both. She was also looking for work in her own locality. It was just after COVID, and finances were a concern.

A local job turned up. She told one of the Suraasa team about it, and about the salary. “I said OK, my family said OK, but sir was not OK with that,” she says. He had checked her profile and her assignments, and his advice, as she recalls it, was to wait for some time: “We’ll help you out, don’t take up the job.” “That support only we need in life,” she says.

Someone else from Suraasa rang her continually for updates, and she gives the questions as she heard them. Schools had been posted to her profile, and the caller wanted to know whether she had applied to them. “What is the response? Did you get any email?”

The vice principal’s call.

In the end she found a job in another city. “That was through my personal search only,” she says. She travelled there and was there for three days. Then the vice principal of the school where she works now called her. The call, she says, came through Suraasa. He asked what she was earning and offered her considerably more.

She lists what she wants in life as three things. “Because finally what you want in life is respect,” she says. Then finance. Then her children: “I want to see them being the best school where they can explore.” Her advice to teachers joining Suraasa is to be positive from day one. “Think that this is what I want. I’m going to do this.”