“What do you want to do after your 12th?”
Every teenager both anticipates and dreads this question.
Everyone knows the feeling of being in high school and being thoroughly confused about what career path you should choose.
Being influenced by parents, peers, and society at large, they blindly go into degrees. Often at the expense of the path they actually wanted to take. But not doing something you want to, also often means you won’t be good at it.
According to statistics from a Business Insider piece on structural unemployment, only 1.5% of Indian engineers have the necessary skills for new-age occupations, and a startling 80% of engineers are unemployed.
Inadequate skill-to-career mapping was a major factor in this, in addition to a lack of exposure to curriculum-related projects.
Promising EdTech startup Redeminds thinks that pupils need to be more than just the uniform products of academic factories in this rapidly changing environment.
Redeminds aims to change this by creating scientifically engineered counseling solutions that especially assist students in identifying the best possible career paths for them.
It seeks to facilitate children’s exploration of their own professional paths through the use of technology and behavioural sciences and to use data to inform decisions while minimizing parental and contextual bias.
Meet The Founders
Nabarupa is a management professional who graduated from ISB, Hyderabad, and is now an entrepreneur.
She brings with her enlightening experiences from her time at Ab InBev and Surfboard Ventures, in addition to the Big 4 account agencies. She also has vast experience in financial modelling, due diligence, and appraisal of promising start-ups in industry and market analysis.
Shiv also graduated from ISB, Hyderabad. He is an engineer who later became a management expert and an entrepreneur.
Shiv is eager to alter how young people select their careers. He has previously worked with MNCs including Capgemini, Infosys, Ab InBev, and Lowe’s.
He has led teams in a variety of real-world strategies and execution throughout the course of his 9-year career, including the card & payments industry, FMCG, home improvement, and now the edtech sector.
A team of 10 people work at Redeminds currently, and they are spread out among the product, game design, engineering, and child psychology verticals.
A Need For Individuality And Guidance
Being a member of a family of doctors, Shiv recalls that his primary career aspiration from a young age was to become a physician.
As a young boy, Shiv only considered becoming a doctor, and hence took after his orthopaedic surgeon father. He then pursued studies to become a doctor, but after failing the medical entrance tests for a prestigious government college, he gave up on the goal.
The next safe choice due to his family’s limited awareness of possible careers, becoming an engineer.
Nabarupa Chatterjee, the co-founder of Redeminds, experienced a similar circumstance. She was forced to pursue becoming a CA from an early age because she hails from a family of CAs. A large number of Indian households experience this.
Shiv and Nabarupa believe it would have been beneficial if at some point someone had conducted an empirical evaluation of their abilities.
And then connected those abilities to potential career options. That would be useful to them in their efforts to change the world and provide information on what career progression looks like along the routes that have been suggested to them.
Shiv had the good fortune to work alongside some accomplished founders and leaders who were tackling pertinent issues while he was at Lowe’s.
Through these conversations, he learned the finer points of a number of business-related topics, such as structuring innovation, developing ideas from nothing, and the significance of product-market fit before coming up with a solution.
Inspired, he made the decision to pursue something he was already enthusiastic about developing a platform for kids to find their job options, an issue that had plagued him and Nabarupa since they were little.
Where Redeminds Stands Now
Recently, Redeminds conducted a pilot program, testing its main Ability Assessment game with a select group of partner schools. Based on the student’s talents and areas of interest, the model links the skills to the many career options.
The training data sets for Redeminds’ career suggestion engine came from a variety of databases containing strengths finder, ability, and personality tests.
As more students take the test, this engine is intended to grow and learn.
Redeminds does not exclusively rely on AI, though, as it strongly believes in the intervention of the human touch. The company hires counseling specialists who take into account the parent’s feedback in order to complement ability assessment results and gain a comprehensive picture of the pupils.
The professionals at Redeminds carefully consider each of these elements before compiling a detailed report on the student’s ideal career paths.
The schools Redemind collaborated with provided highly positive feedback on the trial programs throughout the MVP stage of the product, as well as a very high net promoter score.
Looking To The Future
Recently, Redeminds completed a $220,000 initial investment round with Surfboard Ventures. The money will be utilized to scale its technology, operations, product, and game design teams as well as to enhance its leadership roles.
The people at Redeminds are extremely passionate about using their knowledge to improve the lives of more kids in the coming days. In order to accomplish this, Redeminds hope to enroll in more schools.
“Today on account of a set-defined mindset about limited professions, many individuals have become a slave to jobs that they don’t enjoy. Through Redeminds, our goal is to change this for the future.”
This is what founders Shiv and Nabarupa believe in. An individual’s profession of choice significantly shapes who they are, how they feel, and frequently how they will make decisions in the future.
Since it pays, it is an added benefit when someone may pursue their love in their line of work. Let us look forward to the youth turning to work that they actually love doing and are good at.
