What is Career Guidance Team & What is its progress so far?
What is Career Guidance Team?
Career Guidance Team (CGT) is an initiative taken by the team of 8 young students as part of a Career-Prep Fellowship at Amal Academy. Career Guidance Team’s aim is to guide the students of 12th standard in Pakistan so they can find their dream career path. Once we were discussing how we ended up in our current fields. Then we found that most of us had faced a lack of career guidance in our careers. At that time, we realized there are thousands of students in Pakistan who don’t have access to proper career guidance, resulting in them choosing the wrong careers. So I and my team started this Career Guidance Team initiative.
How we started the project?
Taking responsibility is the most difficult challenge. It was really hard for me and my team because we didn’t know that how we should get started. So, we reached out to Ma’am Sana for her guidance. Ma’am Sana is our program manager at Amal Academy, she’s been our instructor throughout our fellowship.
We started basic research on different career fields and student interests. In the COVID-19 situation, we were not able to reach students in person. So, we created a Google form where we asked very basic questions. After getting responses from students we compiled and analyzed the results and kickstarted our plan.
How we planned the project?
Planning is the most crucial part before starting any project. We arranged a group meeting and discussed that how we should take the project. We began with assigning the roles to everyone, so working in a specific area will benefit more.
Roles and Tasks Assigned to Team
Assigning roles to the team was much easier as I thought. I assigned the tasks to everyone relevant to their fields. Like as shown below:
- Team Lead
A project without a leader leads nowhere. We had to choose who will be leading the team. We arranged a zoom meeting and had a discussion on who is going to be the leader. I created a poll and asked everyone to answer the poll. After the result, I became the Team Lead. My task is to keep everyone connected and motivated in the team. - Project Manager
We always need someone to manage every task of the project, I had experience in managing and leading teams, I volunteered as Project Manager with one of our fellow Benish Imtiaz. She is an energetic research student, completing her bachelor's in a well-known university. Our task is to arrange meetings, getting daily progress reports from the team. - Content Creation Team
Our project is based on a YouTube channel, so we create video content for the students. Ayesha Naseem and Rabia Jameel volunteered for video creation. They create awesome videos for our channel. The main tasks of Ayesha and Rabia are to create videos. - Script Writing
Video content creation a script to follow. Sadia Yaseen and Tazeen Zahra volunteered for the scriptwriting. The main tasks include doing research and writing awesome scripts for the videos. - Voice Over
Video without voiceover is nothing. So we needed someone who can record the voiceover for our videos. So Tazeen and Rabia took the responsibility for the voiceover. - Marketing
If we are not reaching the right audience, there is no benefit of content creation. Luckily we had Sumayya and Yusra in our team. Both of them took responsibility and volunteered. Sumayya is working on the Facebook page and group while Yusra is working on the Instagram handle. The main tasks both of them have are to keep the audience engaged by using marketing tactics and sharing different posts and stories on social media accounts.
What was our plan to achieve?
The first two weeks spent was all about doing research, learning the required skills, and planning the entire project. In the first two weeks, we arranged a couple of meetings, and we came up with this plan given below.
In the project, we had two phases to achieve:
Phase 1: In the first phase we planned to achieve was that we had to reach at least a hundred subscribers milestone on the YouTube channel. On the YouTube channel, we planned to upload at least 5 videos in the first month of the project. In phase 1 we also planned to reach as much audience as we can on social media through different marketing tactics.
Phase 2: After the successful completion of phase 1, we had planned phase 2 of our project. In phase 2 we have planned to conduct online workshops with students, where we will be providing proper guidance to the 12th class students of Pakistan.
What we have achieved so far?
So far we have reached to 100 YouTube subscribers milestone. We have collected data of more than 40 students to whom we will be arranging workshops in phase 2. Our channel is being watched by more than 500 students.
How do we plan on achieving our goals (Timeline)?
We plan to achieve our goals by reaching the maximum number of Fsc. students and provide them information about different fields. In this aspects we adopt
In-Person approach: We will contact our relatives, juniors, friends of friends. And gather all the Fsc. community to Facebook and Instagram plate forms and fill Google form.
Your target is to get a minimum of 100 signups as a whole and 9 signups per member.
Social Media approach: We will contact different social media groups and pages where Fsc. students ask for help. We’ll make videos related to engineering and marketing and upload them on Youtube. We’ll make our social media pages functional and provide them authentic and up-to-date information (Entry test date, syllabus, Merit of different universities, Application process).
As we approached students of different fields and get to know their personal experience about their fields and make collaboration with them:
In this way, we made a team of different fields to provide the Information and will approach more people from engineering, marketing, and educational backgrounds to get to know about their field.
We will also contact professional career guidance counselors, professors of different colleges and universities to provide their guidance. We will record the response of successful people in different fields.
We will arrange a workshop with students to address their queries next month.
After 1–2 workshops we will arrange a 1 o 1 session with students and guide them according to their related subjects and interests.
Our social media pages and engagement over there?
The main medium of delivery of Career Guidance is through our YouTube channel. Due to COVID-19, our plan was to make a platform online to facilitate the students. We tried to engage as many second-year students as we knew within our friends and family circle which allowed us to reach 112 subscribers in 4 weeks.
We have posted two videos until now on YouTube. Our first video has more than 450 views while our second video which was posted a day ago has been watched more than 130 times. This shows our YouTube reach. For our Facebook page, we uploaded our logo first as an introduction to our brand which helped us reach a considerable audience. Both of these were made in Canva.
In the next two posts, we tried to introduce our brand and our team to give the social media page a personal touch. Our team is from diverse career backgrounds which allows the students to learn about different fields. Both of these were made on Canva by our team and the impressions show we reach a considerable audience as you can see in the images below.
In the next posts, we tried to introduce our YouTube channel to our Facebook audience. The introduction video and our first video were posted on our page.
https://www.facebook.com/CareerGuidanceTeam
We also posted our Google Doc Form on the Facebook page to add more members to our database. This was an animated poster made on Canva.
In the next few weeks, we plan to work on our Facebook group which will allow us to engage at a more personal level with the students. Students will be able to post problems, connect with each other, ask questions and get solutions to their problems.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/4907168142644422
We plan to include more posters, make more videos and engage on social media with our audience.
The most important medium of delivery of Career Guidance is through our Instagram page. Due to the pandemic situation in our country, we provide an online platform to students of class 12th. We decided to make an Instagram account and started working on it.
Here is the link to the Instagram Page.
https://www.instagram.com/CareerGuidanceTeam
Firstly we set a profile photo with our logo of “Career Guidance”. Set a complete profile, add a description in front of the page, and add a link to our YouTube channel. Right now on our page, there are a total of 66 followers and a total of 7 posts we add on it and add highlights as well. There is a very crucial step to engage the audience and design different types of relevant posters for the page. The next step was how to design a poster for an Instagram page. We decided on a theme and color according to our logo. Here are the posters which we posted on our page.
We started making posters with Coming soon because it creates curiosity in the audience and the audience waits for the next post. We designed the next post about “Are you still confused about your career”? Basically, we asked questions to the audience, and the line “We are here for you, your future is our future” shows a sign that we all are with you. We added a quote about dreams and encouraged the audience to follow us not only on the Instagram page but also on the Facebook page and finally gave an invitation to Join virtual assistance in your career path with the “Career Guidance Team”.
We add highlights about our team and different stories of people who share their experiences and tell them about their fields. In the next few weeks, we plan to work more on our Instagram page. Add more posters and videos on our page so that we engage more of the audience on our page.
Learnings and Takeaways
In the project, I and my team learned how to work in teams. We learned how to convince the people. We learned how to state your point to other peoples and how to reach them. We learned about different tools and techniques. We have learned how to face challenges, and how to deal with the challenges. I personally learned how to manage projects, how to lead people.