With a plethora of career opportunities, and new courses cropping up each academic year, many career aspirants are spoilt for choice — both in terms of selecting their desired course or even picking a job. However, a lack of accurate guidance and in-depth knowledge about a course or career leave many students and job seekers indecisive. There’s even a rural-urban divide in addressing the gap, with metro cities such as Mumbai, Delhi, and Kolkata still having provisions for career counselling, a trend yet to pick up in the country’s hinterlands. CareerNaksha, a Gujarat-based IIT-IIM alumni venture, aims to address it all by providing personalized data-driven online and offline career counselling across the country.
Focussing on the rural areas, the start-up has targeted many schools to highlight the importance of career counselling, besides disseminating appropriate information to the youth. It has collaborated with many civil society organizations to help the children in need of psychological counselling, a niche segment that the venture emphasizes with respect to education and career.
According to the start-up, they work at two levels, imparting not just career counselling but also looking at aspirants’ psychological aspects through psychological counselling. Its psychometric tests and training programs help students select the right career path. The team responsible for psychological counselling help students, who face difficulty in coping with the environment or career-related problems, prepare for better opportunities.
“The psychometric test gave me a scientific analysis through different dimensions like my interest areas, abilities, knowledge, and how well my personality suits my interest. For a person like me, to whom data brings more clarity, the test helped a lot,” said Prutha Shah, who was pursuing charted accountancy (CA) along with B.Com, but knew CA was not for her. She said that CareerNaksha helped her understand various aspects of “management” as a career, which was her calling.
Counsellors across the country who tie up with the venture are trained in such a way that accuracy and authenticity are maintained throughout the counselling period of the student. Both — career counsellors and psychological counsellors — acquire immense knowledge on what could be the best for a student and how counselling could actually do wonders in her life.
“To only know what to do in life isn’t enough, but to have appropriate guidance, mentoring, and knowledge is what we need to cater to the future aspirants of the country,” said Mr Nimish Gopal, the founder of CareerNaksha.
TOUCHING MILESTONES
Going by the belief of guidance and mentoring, the start-up has reached many heights in terms of helping out children not only with their mindset but help with others’ lives and careers too. The lack of appropriate career guidance in many quarters has made CareerNaksha take this necessary step to inculcate the process of decision making and how what, and when to start planning for one’s future.
“CareerNaksha’s approach towards career guidance seems the most suitable as they don’t make a decision for you but provide you with well-rounded information and exposure,” said Prutha, the 18-year-old B.Com student at Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda. The first-year student has already completed her internship in marketing in pursuit of her interest.
The team at the organization is dedicated and keeps updating its methods to broaden students’ and parents’ frames of mind.
CareerNaksha has observed that children nowadays do not pursue the streams, such as engineering or medical studies, which were too common a decade ago. Courses such as designing, architecture, psychology, and digital marketing have taken precedence. The organization’s team has helped many students pick their preferred career choice amid so many options and do well in their professional lives.
Interestingly, even parents have become non-conventional and supportive of their children’s stream of interests. In such times, CareerNaksha has welcomed all types of clients and helped them in the best way possible in terms of career or psychological counselling. “Correct career guidance and counselling by CareerNaksha created confidence in us and helped us support our child more in whatever path she chose,” said Prutha’s father.
