CAREERNAKSHA the most trusted full-stack career platform wants to make career counselling accessible for Bharat

For 5 years CareerNaksha has been providing affordable career counselling and guidance services in the tier 1-2-3 cities of Gujarat. Now as a part of the growth story, they are expanding to the entire India with localized partnerships and online-offline centers. Their goal is to provide the most trusted career counselling platform to students and professionals of Bharat.

IITian turned social entrepreneur Nimish Gopal started CareerNaksha to solve the problem of choosing a career based on external influence by students or professionals rather than own strengths and interests. More than 90% of students go into rats’ race and face challenges in the future with wrong career decisions, resulting in more stress and anxiety. The problem is so big that millions of students are directionless and parents are not aware of new-age career options. This is creating a huge demand-supply gap in the industry with an additional increase in unemployment. Challenges are two-fold, at one end there is a lack of availability of trained & certified career counsellors in every school or educational institute, reducing the access to quality career counselling experience. On the other end, it has resulted in more pressure among students joining random coaching institutes to crack competitive exams.

“I have been one of the victims of wrong career decision-making at school, I chose science with mathematics because everyone wanted to do the same. Then went to Nirma University and took Instrumentation Engineer as it was trending 15 years ago. While working at L&T & Adani Greens, I was not satisfied and wanted to pursue entrepreneurship – this is when I met Nimish and joined CareerNaksha as co-founder. Since 2020 we are profitability and growing exponentially” – Maulin Shah, Co-founder & Advisor, CareerNaksha

Drawing experiences from the USA and around the world in the field of education and career systems, CareerNaksha is making career counselling mainstream. Every student in every school today urgently requires the best psychometric tools, passionate counsellors and a career platform that can support them in their dream career journey. So far they have impacted more than 10 Lakh students via digital media, offline sessions, social impact projects and thousands of educational institutes including schools & universities.

In the last 1 year, CareerNaksha has expanded the community of trained and certified counsellors with the partnership of CCI and ICHARS resulting in the largest community of counsellors in India today crossing 5000 members. Also, CareerNaksha is expanding to offer full-stack career services like career fairs, admissions support, study abroad and Indian university admissions via GlobalVidhya program as an extension for schools and colleges. “There is an immediate need to organize such large scale events, awareness sessions and expand the reach via various growth mechanisms in tier-2-3 cities – exactly what we are doing now” – Tushar Karlekar, Vice President Growth, CareerNaksha

The platform is also scaling its operations to take up large-scale CSR projects with notable corporates and make career counselling accessible to government schools and underprivileged students. The growth of CareerNaksha has been phenomenal with 10-20% month-on-month growth in users and revenues.

“Keeping its focus, CareerNaksha offers psychometric assessments in vernacular languages for a variety of career decision-making applications. The test is validated in the Indian context having a research basis and data science behind it. The framework used is Occupational Information Network (O*NET) which contains hundreds of job definitions to help students, job seekers, businesses and workforce development professionals to understand the kind of careers available to students & professionals” – Dr. Mohit Bhatnagar, Associate Professor at Jindal Global Business School, Scientist & Innovator of Psychometric Assessments

Post-pandemic career counselling is becoming more important and schools are accepting its significance as well. Some of the large-scale players in this space who have been providing career counselling for 10+ years are iDreamcareer, Mindler, Univariety, CareerGuide etc. As the market size is very big and there is scope for organizing this space with consolidations in the future along with acquisitions by giant career-techs or ed-techs, hence more than the competition it is about growing societal awareness and making counselling mainstream.

“We want to expand CareerNaksha and reach 2-3 Cr revenues per month along with increasing the profitability to 20%. We aim to reach 10X growth in the next 2-3 years. We plan to expand geographically with strategic partnerships, community growth and opening 100+ delivery centers across Bharat” – Nimish Gopal, Founder & Director www.careernaksha.com