In our consultation sessions, we often encounter concerns from senior high school students about their career orientation. Many students, even close to the application deadline, still do not know what major or school they want to study. Many students choose a career based on trends, friends' encouragement, and the wishes of their parents and relatives, not really based on their own abilities, strengths, or desires.

Choosing the wrong career causes many consequences. First of all, it will waste time, effort, and money of the student and his family. Second, it will not help the student develop his abilities in the field that should be his strength.

The recent increase in the number of students being suspended or dropping out of school is a reflection of the lack of orientation in choosing a major for university. Because they do not study a suitable major, many students either cannot keep up due to their inability to meet the requirements, or get discouraged and give up.

We have also witnessed many regretful stories when parents ran around trying to contact their children, who were students in their final years of university, but were unsuccessful. In the end, they realized that because they could not keep up with their studies, no matter how hard they tried, they had to drop out of school, afraid that their parents would be sad, so they cut off all contact.

There are also cases where students study the major that their relatives want, trying to study until graduation day. After receiving the diploma, they give it to their parents and ask for permission to study again the major that matches their wishes and strengths...

The desire for students to be consulted, understand about careers, and choose a major suitable for their future career sooner has now partly become a reality when applying the 2018 General Education Program.

The goal of the 2018 General Education Program is to strongly differentiate from high school level. That means that as soon as entering this level of education, in addition to compulsory subjects and educational activities, students will choose elective subject combinations according to their career orientation.

The past 3 years of implementing the new General Education Program at the high school level have caused a lot of confusion and bewilderment from schools, parents and students in choosing the combination of elective subjects. Now, schools, parents and students are all aware that they need to learn about careers at universities, the combination of elective subjects at high schools... right from when 9th grade students are preparing for the 10th grade exam, not waiting until 11th or 12th grade because that would be too late.

This is a good sign in career orientation. Early access to counseling will help students have time to adjust and limit wrong choices.

Learning about university majors from grade 9, in some ways, will hopefully lead to more effective education streaming after junior high school, which has not been achieved as planned for a long time.

When studying and doing work that suits your ability, efficiency will be higher; there will be opportunities to improve the quality of human resources, which has been a weakness of Vietnam until now. In this way, Vietnamese education is gradually moving in the same direction as advanced education systems in the world.