Career guidance for Higher Education in India

Challenge:

In India, total enrollment in higher education stands at 3.46 million students. However, in numerous instances, the choices of courses/streams are not made by students but purely on the recommendation from family, friends & neighbourhood. This choice is often based on previous experiences of the recommender or job prospects of the course/stream and is then enforced upon the student by their parents. Thus, even after having successfully secured an admit, students end up undertaking career decisions which are not aligned to their interests and then get stuck with this decision.

Adequate knowledge about the course & program prospects will help students decide if it is inclined towards their goals. To achieve this, the students can do self-research and seek guidance from mentors, who have themselves been in similar shoes & are aware of the specifics related to the course/stream.

Solution:

Establishment of education centres in remote districts are not feasible for large coaching centres such as FIITJEE & TIME etc. and often they do not provide similar quality of teachers/mentors like their metropolitan counterparts. Thus, students from such remote districts are not able to avail good quality guidance services.

With the advent of technology and rising internet penetration, India’s internet users currently stand at 566 million, driven by rural growth & is expected to increase at a high rate even in the next few years to reach 627 million by the year-end. Leveraging technology, a platform can be built which can connect mentors and mentees who are not co-located and thus has the potential to reach out to students despite their geographical location. This proposition has other numerous advantages for mentees as it will be cheaper than traditional services, provide the flexibility of choice regarding the scheduling of discussions and accessibility to a large pool of mentors. It is attractive for the mentors as well because it provides them with flexibility in terms of location & time while providing an additional source of income.

Lastly, the platform can be used to gradually provide a wide array of counselling services all throughout the academic lifetime of a student from school to corporate progression. 

Storyboard for prototyping:

Before Scenario

After Scenario

Prototyping:
Feels-like prototype for our service would be :

Poster

                                                                                  Video Explaining the services

Looks-like prototype for our service would be :

Landing Page of website

List of all services 

Dedicated page for Mentors

Low-cost experiment:

Hypothesis: Education & guidance can help individuals in taking better career decisions which are aligned to their interests. 

Plan of Action: During the preparation phase & after the results declaration phase, numerous social media groups are formed wherein students post their queries. We will identify such groups and make posts in such groups to market the services being offered by the platform. These posts would showcase information regarding our platform and contain a link to the website & video. In order to establish credibility, we would update our profiles with our credentials to attract students. Upon being redirected to our website, the students will be asked to signup to get a free profile evaluation. Once satisfied with their profile evaluation, they could buy a relevant coursepack (between engineering, commerce, B-school etc) as per their needs to get started. In order to gain initial traction, we will provide financial assistance in the form of discounts on the available course packages.

We plan to leverage existing free technologies to conduct the experiment:

• Website templates which are free, widely available & completely editable
• Website hosting services costing ~1000 INR for a year
• Social media websites (e.g. Facebook page for posts)
• Web & Google forms for registrations
• Payment gateway charging a small commission of ~3%
• Gmail for all communications with students & mentors

Costs: The costs involved in the whole experiment is very small as we would be using existing free technology. Besides the opportunity cost associated with time, the only costs to be borne during the experiment is the costs of buying web hosting services which is relatively small. 

After the registration is complete, the student can log in into the portal and request for the services.  The communication between the student and the mentor would be using telephone or Skype depending on the convenience of both the participants. We plan to leverage ourselves & our friends in the initial phase to provide the mentoring services to students, and with the increase in demand, we plan to onboard mentors and pay them monetary incentives. 

Success Criteria: In order to test the feasibility of the experiment, we will be considering the following things:

• Measuring KPI’s useful for measuring customer satisfaction such as Net Promoter Score – High scores would be considered as a measure of success because that would mean that a customer had a good experience & perceives it to be valuable enough to be recommended to someone else
• Effectiveness of internet-based counselling service - This will be evaluated using the number of signups and revenue generated which would help us understand if customers are willing to pay for our services.
• Impact of the service - We would try to track the number of students who are able to successfully secure their dream jobs or college admits