Gone are the times when career counselling was provided by a relative or a neighbourhood uncle/aunt over a cup of tea. Digitalisation has drastically brought a transition in the educational system in India from online tutoring to online counselling and now with the most popular messaging application WhatsApp. Students are using this platform to get their queries answered instantly.
looking at the need of the hour, Xomidhan, a non-profit online career counselling platform in the North East, has launched an innovative initiative of counselling students through WhatsApp. It conducted the first live WhatsApp career counselling session on Studying Abroad May 7, 2017. More than 50 graduate and post graduate students participated in the session asking their queries related to pursuing higher education in US, Australia and England.
“The idea behind the WhatsApp counselling session was to answer to as many questions as possible in a limited amount of time so that maximum people were benefited. To help students understand the do’s and don’ts as well as the selection of good institutions, scholarship facilities and life after education so that they are prepared for the ground realities,” says Nidarshana Saikia, co-founder, Xomidhan, one of the first online career counselling organisation in Assam.
In online counselling sessions, students don’t get answers at an individual basis and if they get it, it is very generic. It isn’t possible to connect an expert with a student on a face to face basis and online counselling proves to be the most alluring and feasible channel.
Addressing the challenges in WhatsApp counselling, Anshuman Dutta, communications head, of Xomidhan, says: “The challenge was to make sure that there is no overlap of questions and avoid repetition of questions already answered. We were addressed by a moderator in place and a backend team which was vigilant that not a single question is left unanswered. As an organisational vision, we plan to reach as much students as possible and make the difference. We also have a mentorship programme for which we are planning to come up with the next batch of students. Our primary objective is to make sure that source meets the destination. Hence, any query that comes to us is answered by specialised experts.”
Xomidhan focuses on students in the age group of 12 - 20 years old as that is the most critical and crucial time to focus and start working on the path. This has become the most convenient option for the students to connect with the counsellors who help them in making an informed decision. However, Manjit Nath, co-founder, Xomidhan points out its disadvantages. “We believe on guiding the students to take an informed decision instead of forcing them. The stigma is mostly to deal with private profit making consultancy businesses. Consultants are provided input to bias their suggestions. This is a human problem independent of the platform (online/offline). It is a free career counselling start up, completely non-profit with the singular objective to connect students with experts, share resources or information and empower the youth,” Nath says adding that they are also planning to explore other online mediums.
Saikia, who was moderating the live session said: “The counsellors were able to answer 11 questions in a span of 1 hour including the time spent typing the answers. Students have become more rationalised and demand a step by step professional growth analysis such how would their career choice look at the distant horizon of 15-25 years, the relevance and reliability. Students are more out-spoken and informed of the various career opportunities, instead of relying on the conventional ones such as engineering and medical. We are planning to conduct such events based on various topics regularly and the next live session in June 2017 on Engineering and MBA.”