How an investment banker and her partner structured the process of career guidance: The Vidyartha story

A typical question people used to ask when I was a kid or any kid at that time was what do you want to become when you grow up? The choices invariably revolved around the father’s profession, becoming a teacher, or any other infringing variable such as the uncle being in the Army, someone being a doctor in the family, and so forth. In a highly multidisciplinary and knowledge-centred world we live in, career choices are not easy. Competition for talent spans worldwide in globalized economies that define the world order today, making the granular search for a good career even more difficult. When Navin Balan, a former entrepreneur and C-suite exec, and Priya Mohan, a former investment banker, kickstarted a casual conversation on career choices, they arrived at a different perspective that gave rise to a startup idea—a structured career guidance for students called Vidyartha. Reflecting on how Vidyartha was born, Priya says, “I wish I could point out to one event, possibly to make the genesis more dramatic, but that is not the truth. Vidyartha was assimilated brick by brick after a detailed study of the need, what was currently offered and where we can better it. Yes, the critical fuel to the idea was of our own stories – Navin, my co-founder and me – when we wondered how structured career guidance in school would have helped us and if it would have made us choose a path, possibly different from where we stood.”

Developing a career guidance product

Not happy with the status quo – career guidance through a bunch of tests – Navin and Priya wanted to provide perspectives and give knowledge-based guidance that builds into a career choice for students typically in Class 9 through 12. A base architecture was built initially based on rationalization of their thoughts. This architecture was pilot tested with a target audience “from our friend’s networks and their kin, just to throw brick bats and question us at every point as adolescents would generally do,” in Priya’s words. Realizing the limitations of a counseling-based career guidance that is individual driven, Vidyartha was built as a product right from the beginning with inputs from educationists, psychologists, and psychometricians. Instead of working on the product themselves, Priya says they “built a strong team and our head of psychology has over 15 years in career guidance and is trained under a famed Harvard Professor.” The promoters acted as vestibules to ensure innovativeness and product delivery, adds Priya.

Career guidance is not a one-step, one-test process in Vidyartha. The students are put through interest assessment, personality assessment, aptitude assessment, and academic mapping. Based on this, a 360 degree profile of the student is generated. After the results of these assessments are generated, a one-on-one counselling is arranged with an expert counsellor to help the student chart out an action plan. Then, Priya adds, “Based on the results of the assessments, the Vidyartha program opens up eBooks on relevant careers for the student! Each eBook is based on a career and it features professionals in that career.” For instance, the eBook for law features lawyers from different walks explaining the challenges and opportunities on taking law as a career.

Assessments, psychological testing, and interpretations are done by a team of psychologists. Priya focuses on content and research, while Navin looks after technology and analytics. Strategy is a responsibility of both Priya and Navin.

What makes Vidyartha different?

Priya feels the present career guidance focuses only on assessments and is treated as a “definitive solution” whereas Vidyartha adds two more to it: perspectives and collaboration. She adds: “The Vidyartha’s career guidance program is iterative and our profiling ensures we gather as much information and patterns about the students – interests, personality, aptitude – through our proprietary assessments and in addition, collect and map academic performance, self ratings on the content we serve based on interests, their personal notes during the activities and finally data from their interaction with the counsellor. When a student decides to change or add a new interest area, there is a logical flow and they do so only in an informed manner. The interest is our basis and from there the long term and short term milestones are mapped.”

Customers and product delivery

One of the parents from the feedback group of adolescents became the first customer and the customer base was built to 200 individual customers through referrals. Then the first school was acquired within the first year, which helped them develop a good track record. Now there are 1,000 students on Vidyartha from all parts of India. Building the customer base to a million students brings its own problems. According to Priya, is “scaling up without quality deterioration is a challenge. We are working on it and we have both schools and individual customers referring and we have begun our marketing activities. Time will tell how our strategies are working.”

Vidyartha serves both individual students and schools. The base offering being the same, the schools are served through an in-school program whereas individual students are given activity-based career guidance. As regards the school program, Priya says, “For an in-school program, in addition to the said online activities, we organize 4 to 5 group sessions (tailormade again for each class) along with a final one-on-one counselling, which includes the parents also – where we compile the results and data of the students across the year and put together an action plan.” All the assessments are powered by technology and backend analytics built into Vidyartha.

Abhay Mathur, principal of Chirec Public School, Hyderabad, finds the career guidance methodology of Vidyartha immensely useful. He says, “the four modules in each year start with traits being collected about students in an indirect manner through the completion of a survey. This is then plotted to potential careers and further refined to subjects needed to be successful. The students then compare their career choices with the trait collector results and see if there is a sync.” Then parents are involved in the counseling process as well. Mathur is surprised to see the choice of many students switch away from set answers to previously untouched areas. He concludes, “Whether the children follow the advice or not, the fact remains that these modules get a conversation started on the dinner table at home to help students with their families make an informed choice.”

Funding and team

Vidyartha was bootstrapped from Navin and Priya’s personal funds and recently they raised an undisclosed sum from an angel investor. The team consists of core professionals in technology, psychology, and psychometry.

Pain points of students and advice to parents

There are three categories of students, according to Priya. Those who are clear what they want to do, those who know some of their capabilities, and those who are clueless. Regardless of which category the student belongs to, according to Priya, some of core issues include peer and parental pressure, the battle between interests and their capabilities and lack of awareness about opportunities, adding, “In many instances, in our experience, career choices are localized and changes even by geography!” In these cases, Priya emphasizes, “A more thorough approach to guidance is needed.”

Quoting her chief counsellor, Priya asks parents to keep an open mind. Some parents make a career choice for their children without knowing the child’s interest or natural inclination. The counsellor stresses that “it is important [for parents] to use that knowledge to engage with them [the children] and empower them to make their own decisions.” Priya concludes saying, “after all, everything your child does from school through college are but milestones towards a fruitful career and not just a job!”