Explore your Passion and find the right Career path with GROW

8 min readFeb 12, 2021

An App to help students find their passion and choose the right career option.

This Project is a part of a Hackathon Conducted by Growth School. The whole project was done in 48 hours including the research and the solutions.

Problem Statement

10th & 12th-grade students are usually unclear about their career path as there are so many new fields of profession every day. An e-learning app wants to help its students understand the direction map of what they are good at in what they are studying to existing career options.

Scope For Solving :

A recent survey on career option awareness among Indian students has revealed that a staggering 93% of the students aged 14 to 21 were aware of just seven career options though there are more than 250 different types of job options available in India.
Overflow of content available on the internet can create a lot of confusion in the minds of the students
Lack of encouragement for taking up skill-based profession/career (Herd mentality)
Also, due to the current scenario, most of the education is shifting to an online domain. Students are more active on their mobile phones, providing them a product that can bridge the current gaps would help them.
How could we make this product better than the existing e-learning apps? What would differentiate our product with (Udemy, Skillshare, etc) and guide them based on the learning they prefer?

Timeline for 48 hours:

Before beginning, We created a persona to understand the problem statement deeply and how it’s affecting many students.

Naruto was quite unclear of what to pursue after his high-school, like most of the Desi-parents, his parents enrolled him in an Architecture School right after Sharmaji enrolled his son into the top Architecture School. After 5 years of studying Architecture, he is still unclear if he would wish to continue in the field of Architecture, due to various factors like the future scope of Architecture in India, the pay scale. He now wishes to make a transition in his career path after all these years. What do you think would happen next?

Do you think Naruto would have been in a better place if he had an option to explore the various career options 5 years back?

Research

The data from the Desk Research was overwhelming but still, we couldn’t understand the persona completely and the problem was way more serious than we thought.

National Employability Report’ 2016, which is based on a study of more than 1,50,000 engineering students who graduated in 2015 from over 650 colleges, 80% of them were unemployable and only 3% had suitable skills to be employed in the software or product market.
Feeling overwhelmed by career choices is one manifestation of the over choice or choice overload problem.
The gap between skills required in Industry and Academia is one of the major causes.

To understand the story completely and validate all our assumptions, I went ahead with Primary research.

For the Primary Research, we Interviewed 4 Students and 2 Parents through 1:1 calls.

This sums up most of the student's reactions that we got during our Interviews.

Here is a link to the complete research: https://www.notion.so/Hackathon-Project-942929cf6d4d4008b31126d55cf2c9b6

📌 Top Pain-points identified from the Research:

Due to a lack of skill-based learning, they don’t know what they want.

How might we help them explore the various other skill-based learnings along with their current syllabus?
How might we help them identify their skill set better?

They don’t get the right guidance at the right point in their life. ( Biased and uniformed career guidance)

How might we make sure that the right guidance is assured to them at the right point in time?
How might we make sure that they are on the right track/direction based on their skillset/learnings?

Parents don’t support their children in unconventional career options.

How might we make parents aware of the scope of various upcoming careers?
How might we make sure the parents get the right knowledge of the current scenario?
How might we ensure the parents motivate/support their child’s decision-making, rather than persuading them to take up something of their interest?

The goal is money-driven and not passion/skill driven. This usually drains the student, as they aren’t interested in that area.

How might I present the value of skill-driven opportunities to the students?
How might we ensure students are benefitted by taking up these skills?
How might we encourage students to take up their passion as well?

Overwhelmed by the over-consumption of data, from various platforms. Don’t know which to rely upon

How might we make sure they get the right information?

Don’t get enough options to explore other than the STEM

How might we help explore more options based on their interests?

Often ending up in the wrong career, due to initial misleading.

How might we avoid students being misled by various external factors?

Don't have much knowledge on how the real-workplace functions.(Practical Knowledge)

How might we get students into the real-time experience?
How might we keep the students more hooked to the platform?

📌Further Scoping down of the Pain Points :

Given the time constraint, we further narrowed down our pain points and focused on the issues we would be solving for the Hackathon.

Don’t get enough options to explore other than the core subjects?
They don’t get the right guidance at the right point in their life. ( Biased and uniformed career guidance)
Overwhelmed by the over-consumption of data, from various platforms. Don’t know which to rely upon
The mental health of the students gets affected.

Solutions

Enter your goals and get track of them

“Discover yourself” For solving this particular pinpoint, we added a new section to the E-learning app .wherein the students get an opportunity to explore various interests and skill-sets by themselves. On the route to Discover himself. This section involves constant engagement from the student's sides, by throwing up daily/weekly challenges, and quizzes which would make the student self-aware of these choices. Also at the end of each month, the student would get an overview progress card of his participation in the activities.

Skill-based courses, an overview of the course, various courses by verified tutors, Practical Experience (AR/VR)

Iteration 2: But what if the student is not quite sure of his goal/future yet, thereby providing him with an exploration feature with the app.

After User Testing, We realized many people didn’t understand how to proceed as they didn’t have a specific goal in mind.

3. Selection of interest’s and skills

4. Skill based courses, an overview of the course, various courses by verified tutors, Practical Experience (AR/VR).

5. Overwhelmed by the over-consumption of data, from various platforms. Don’t know which to rely upon

In order to solve this issue, we are providing the students verified information regarding the career options they would like to pursue.

6. The whole process is overwhelming for the students and with so much going on, they often find themselves stressed out or sometimes even end up in depression so that’s why there’s an option to talk to an expert online.

Why Choose Grow?

📌Grow is an e-learning app, which along with the core-subjects makes an effort to expose students to many more career options or skill-set they want to acquire. Providing them the freedom to explore different streams.

📌Make the students discover themselves, rather than following the herd mentality.

📌Assures Parents, by giving them a glance at the student's progress.

📌Space for students to keep track of their goals and vision, and provide them reliable data on the future scope for the career they wish to take up

📌Mental health Forums and Doctors to help students talk about their problems at any point in time

Future Scope For the Project

We’ve been hearing a lot over the past few years about how virtual reality has the potential to transform the way we learn and teach and it has already made its way in E-Learning.

An experiment carried out by Google’s Daydream labs found that people who got VR training learned faster and better than those who were merely shown video tutorials.

Students can benefit a lot from using this technology and it’ll be a great way to fill the gap between theoretical learning and Practical World.

How it will help them in choosing the right career option?

By using AR and VR as a portal for career exploration, students have the opportunity to determine before spending money and time on training whether or not their chosen profession is the right one for them. It’s possible that students will spend less time trying to decide on a career path. Instead, they’ll launch their futures much quicker because of the head start this new AR and VR approaches to technology provides.