ambitionME: Helping Students Make Informed Career Decisions
Getting skeptical over their career is not a new experience for any student and the monotonous aptitude tests have proved futile for the younger generation. Vishal Haria started ambitionME alongwith Prashi Agarwal and Varsha Sarkar, because they strongly believed that an informal yet practical process had to be adopted by students to attain skills and pursue careers. And ambitionME delivers the same, a platform which focuses on building career choices for students.
ambitionME is a Mumbai based startup which helps mould career for the youth through workshops, events, creating opportunities by both offline/online means. ambitionME engages 16-30 year olds, giving them a platform to explore their aspirations which includes more than just aptitude tests. The workshops conducted by ambitionME help students to get an idea of their dream career by interactions and activities with different domain experts. To facilitate these workshops ambitionME has knowledge partners in different domains who are keen on engaging with youths. They also maintain formal relationships with some blue chips companies including ICICI Direct (Finance), Outlook Money (Journalism), LatentView Analytics (Analytics).
The startup also covers other domains such as human resources, photography, hospitality and marketing. They conduct workshops on these subjects for youngsters. Vishal shares “Initially we had launched ambitionMe as a part of our market research, our other offerings include online resources (blog, freebooks) and offline soft skill workshops. The underlying vision is fairly simple - enable students to help themselves. ” The co-founders conduct survival skills sessions and for career experiences they have joined hands with knowledge partners who are willing to engage youth. Knowledge partners are accomplished individuals or premier organizations having credible experience to offer to youngsters, explains Vishal.
ambitionME was co-founded by three IIM alumni: Prashi Agarwal, Varsha Sarkar and Vishal Haria. They started as classmates at IIM Calcutta then colleagues at Opera Solutions before founding ambitionME in April 2012. “ambitionME is a summary of all our different passions: making young people self aware, creating one of a kind experiences and making technology work for ‘good’” says Vishal. They are assisted by over 30 interns working on the platform from different locations, who lend support on social media, writing and coming up with ideas for the next workshops.
ambitionME has successfully launched workshops and seminars for the benefit of more than 2,300 students from 65 different colleges spread across the Delhi/NCR region. Some of these colleges that ambitionME has conducted career workshops include Delhi University, Jamia Milia Islamia University, Amity University, Delhi Technological University, Indraprastha University. The startup charges a small processing fee from the students and the partners for conducting seminar and workshops. Many unpaid seminars are also organized by ambitionME but are limited to the Delhi/NCR region, though in future they have plans to expand to other cities as well.
ambitionME is registered in Mumbai and Vishal is based in Mumbai, while the other two other co-founders are based in Delhi/NCR. The team mostly works from home and conduct workshops wherever needed, geographical locations are no hindrance to their business. “We launched our operations in Delhi/NCR as it has good geographical concentration of various types of colleges. We plan to roll-out in other geographies as well.
Their site today has over 200 registered users and 2,100 students are on their email newsletter lost, the startup also has a decent fan count on Facebook. The workshops are priced in the range of from Rs. 900 to Rs. 2000 per student and this is either charged from the students of the knowledge partner.
ambitionME has received encouraging responses from their partners and the students who have liked their services. Vishal believes “we need to be very structured and careful about how we grow as the challenges are unknown (yet) and it is easy to digress from the core of our offering.” They are also developing an online platform to include non-career related aspects as well. The platform will have student-centric fun activities, contests, skill-building exercises, opportunity listings and online resources. Over the next few months, ambitionME plans to engage both our students and corporate customers.
Website : ambitionME
