A guiding light

When I got posted as Secretary of School Education, Government of India in 2016 after spending a couple of years sorting out the mess in the coal sector, I hoped that I would be moving out of the dark dungeons of coal mines to the bright light of school education. I was proved wrong. The mafias of school education were worse than those in coal. I was also perhaps the least experienced civil servant in the education sector to occupy this post. The idea, therefore, was to learn, and learn fast. The objective was to understand the ground reality. I travelled across 23 states during the initial period. It was indeed a period of enormous learning. Around this time, I got to know about the wonderful work being done by civil society organisations to improve the quality of school education through cooperation with state governments. It was during one of these visits that I learnt about the phenomenal work being done by iDreamCareer under the inspired leadership of its founders — Ayush Bansal and N Praveen Kumar — in the critical area of career guidance and how technology was being leveraged for this purpose. It is indeed heartening to note that this organisation has gone from strength to strength.

Only one out of 10 students in India receives career guidance, and 93 per cent of Indian schools do not even have career counsellors. Only about 23 per cent of overall school students in India continue with higher education after their secondary schooling. This is further compounded by a huge peer and family influence on students to pursue careers in either engineering or medicine.

The traditional Indian education system has extremely limited intervention in providing career guidance to students. India can reap benefits from its demographic dividend (massive youth population) only if the youth are guided properly. Hence, career guidance services for young students are the need of the hour. Proper guidance could lead to a productive workforce by tapping the talent of students to meet the demands of both industry and academia.

iDreamCareer.com was founded to address this social need with a vision to empower each student in India to make a well-informed decision about their colleges and future careers. In the past nine years, the team has empowered over five million students. Its non-profit sister arm — Aasman Foundation — has launched tech-enabled career guidance services, with the support of UNICEF (India), for 14 states and 21 million+ students. The programme is the largest of its kind in India. iDreamCareer has been recognised by ASUGSV (USA) as one of the world's top 200 EdTech players. It has also been listed among the top 100 EdTech organisations of 2020 in South Asia by primary EdTech intelligence firm, Holon IQ.

Each student is unique and has a distinctive set of competencies. Hence, they must also have a typical career path that is best suited to their aptitudes. iDreamCareer.com offers each student a unique career journey through a personalised dashboard that delivers actionable guidance on 550+ careers across 25,000 colleges, covering 2.8 lakh courses, 1,150+ entrance exams & 1200+ scholarships. The uniqueness of each career journey is ensured by a psychometric assessment tool that assesses students on 16 factors in aptitude, personality and interest, and comes out with a customized career report to help students understand their strengths as well as weaknesses. Alternatively, the organisation also offers a proprietary 90-hour certification and training programme with an aim to expand the counselling task force in India. To date, it has trained 1,300+ career counsellors and 1.10 lakh teachers in 97,000 government schools.

Additionally, iDreamCareer has developed, customised and dedicated career portal/apps for multiple state governments. Two teachers in every such empowered school are trained to use the career portal in order to effectively deliver career guidance and advisory services to their students. These apps provide a login facility for every student in the state to enter and access their personalised career dashboard. Furthermore, every state government's education department is equipped with a live programme management dashboard to track and monitor the entire programme on a real-time basis. As of date, 14 such state career portals have been developed across 14 states with the support of UNICEF (India). The use of a tech-enabled digital platform has massively helped in the scaling up of the administration of career guidance to school students. For all state government collaborations, neither the students nor the governments have any financial obligation as they receive the programme free of cost, making it affordable and inclusive.

For students enrolled in private schools/colleges, iDreamCareer.com offers personalised online programmes — right from helping them decide their preferable stream/subject combination in class 11 and assistance for college applications (both in India and overseas) to job readiness programmes and many other provisions. Students, as well as their parents, can directly enrol on iDreamCareer platform for an entirely online programme.

For non-profits and corporate CSR channels, iDreamCareer has customised career guidance offerings for their supported schools as well as employee volunteering programmes, besides running and managing scholarships.

With class 10 and 12 board exams being cancelled due to the pandemic, there was confusion and anxiety among school students regarding their future career paths. With iDreamCareer's online offerings, millions of Indian students were able to receive the required guidance during these difficult COVID times.

iDreamCareer has also recently started a new initiative called iDX.education to introduce young students to trending skills and provide them workplace/professional exposure. Micro-learning programmes, planned through cohort-based delivery methods, are available for students, specifically focusing on areas like entrepreneurship, journalism, design thinking, economics, financial literacy etc.

Inclusive career guidance is one of iDreamCareer's key focuses. Its career curriculum is gender-responsive, mapped to students with special needs and is India's only multilingual career guidance platform, offering its content and the proprietary psychometric career assessment tool in English, Hindi and eight other regional languages.

With its vision to empower students belonging to all income groups, iDreamCareer aims to make career guidance services available for all students across Indian states, irrespective of their socio-economic background. It provides a wonderful example of Nexus of Good as there is scaling of good practices and innovations through public-private partnerships.

Views expressed are personal