Career Guidance

Today a lot of students, both in school and in college and their parents are faced with a very confusing proposition of choosing a course or career. This confusions gets compounded by the fact that there are a number of lucrative options are there in front of the students. Moreover the influence of media, parents and peers create an unnecessary pressure in the mind of the young students. All these factors create a need for expert external help. It is here that the need for external Career Guidance comes into play.

What is Career Guidance

Career Guidance is the service that a student or parent get where they are told about the Inherent Talent Pattern of the student and accordingly suggestions for the student’s future course of action are given. Career Guidance can be provided both in an online environment and in offline environment. Till a few years back Career Guidance was all about the providing information about different courses and careers to young students. However this has undergone major changes in the last few years. The whole process of Career Guidance has evolved into a much more robust process wherein the focus is to correctly find the Inherent Strength pattern of the individual student. Once this Strength pattern is known, then the career counselor can guide the student to those courses where the student can utilize his/her natural talents to the fullest.

How Career Guidance is given?

Career Guidance is provided by expert career counselors in a specialized way. MapMyTalent follows a fool-proof process of providing Career Guidance. The process followed by MapMyTalent is as follows:

First and foremost, the student has to take a psychometric test, this is essentially an Aptitude Test, a Personality and an Interest Test. A good test like the one at MapMyTalent also has a section that captures parental expectations also, particularly for those students who are still in school. In addition, a good test like the one at MapMytalent would also capture some qualitative information about the individual.
Next step in the career guidance process is to analyze the Aptitude, Personality and Interest Profile of a student. In this step, the career counselor checks on the different Aptitude-personality combinations of the students and checks which are the careers and courses where the student can utilize his/her Inherent Strengths to the Best. The basic philosophy being that when an individual utilizes his / her talents at work or study, then he/she enjoys that and work becomes fun and an extraordinary performance can be expected from the student.
The last step is when the career counselor using his/her experience about the competencies required to study a particular course matches that with the Aptitude-Personality profile of the student and recommends the Best Fit courses and careers to the student where the student has a very good chance of turning into an extraordinary performer. As a matter fact, it has been noted that no matter which one is working in, if one turns out to be extraordinary performer then naturally monetary compensation is also very high. So extraordinary performance is the real mantra of career success.

Is online Career Guidance equally Good?

This question about whether online career guidance is as good as personal one-on-one counseling, usually comes to the mind of students and parents who are a little vary about the efficacy of the online medium.

We at MapMyTalent have very good experience of conducting both offline one-on-one career counseling and the online career counseling as well. We believe that online career guidance can be equally effective if the processes are clearly thought through and they are developed by those who have deep knowledge and experience of career counseling. At MapMyTalent we have perfected the processes of online career guidance and the feedback of students and parents bears testimony to the same. Any good online career guidance program must have the following components:

Any good online career guidance program must have very good psychometric instruments. It should be checked if the Aptitude Test, Personality Test and the Interest Test are standardized and are valid. Once must also check the reliability scores of the instruments being used.
Then, it should also be seen that whether the Aptitude Test are contextually relevant for Indian Population.
The most important aspect in any good online career guidance product is the career recommendation and course matching algorithm. The greatness of any career counselling product lies in the robustness of it’s career matching algorithm. At MapMyTalent, this career matching algorithm is an outcome of very extensive secondary research conducted by some of the fines minds (Ph.D’s, IIT, IIM alumni) operating in this space.