[Updated] CareerPro — How’s the counselling going?

5 min readSep 29, 2021

After thorough research and gathering data on bachelor programs, we completed our planning phase and moved to the execution phase, i.e. the 2nd actionable step. To save time we interleaved tasks of step 2 and step 3 and this worked out great as most of the tasks were not dependent on subsequent step tasks. Let’s have an update on the progress of the Mega Project.

Progress

We have completed tasks of actionable step 2 and step 3 which are listed as under:

Setup Social Media Profiles

You can find CareerPro on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram which are main sources for promotion. The links are attached as follows:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/careerpropk/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/careerpropk/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/careerpro.pk/

Social Media Profiles are managed by Maryam and Bassma.

2. Promotion Posts on Social Media

We have been promoting our platform on social media for past 3–4 days and it has been getting a decent traction. The page following and post engagement play a significant role in getting students to sign up for sessions. We have posts lined up for each day to maintain consistent engagement.

Promotions posts are designed by Nadeem, Bassma and Maryam. All posts can be found at any of social media handles mentioned in the above section.

3. Setup Web Hosting and Domain

Since I am a Web Hosting Reseller, we did not have to pay for $5/month for our web hosting. The domain was graciously purchased for $3/year by our group member, Aamir.

Website can be accessed at: http://www.careerpro.live/

4. Reached out to Professionals and Students

Our members are reaching out to professionals and students in their contacts. Till now, we are able to get on board 2 professionals related to Law/Media Studies and Computer Science. Along with that, almost 10 students are willing to join our first session and starting from today, we shall sign all of them up before our first session in 3 days .

Aamir and I have reached out to get professionals on board while Rubbia has made a major contribution in getting students to sign up for our sessions.

Sign up form for students: https://docs.google.com/forms/u/0/d/1EEk97l63SDclo4YagBYS_uxNWSRdiR7ycuhUrOfICag/viewform?edit_requested=true

5. Planned our First Session

We have scheduled our first session on Friday, October 1, 2021 at 7 PM. It shall be a general guidance session where we shall guide the students along with a guest speaker.

Adrash is taking care of arranging free software for conducting the sessions.

Challenges

There were a few challenges that we faced:

As our debit cards are not activated for international payment, Aamir had to reach out to his friend for purchasing the domain.
Reaching out to professionals and convince them into attending sessions in short amount of time.
Approaching students was a difficult task but we managed to get a few students from our friends, family and acquaintance.
Interleaving steps led us to redefine roles and assign multiple tasks. Moreover, we had to complete the setup and initial promotion process within 3–4 days so that we can conduct our first session this week.

Significant Changes

We did not make any significant changes. However, we got a few other circles on board with us that shall collaborate with us in following ways:

They shall provide information on students that need counselling. In return, we shall survey our session attendees and provide data back to other circles.
We shall promote their initiative during break and they shall help us gain more traction by advertising our initiative.

Impact Generated

We haven’t generated any impact yet. We shall be able to report real figures and statistics related to the effectiveness of our initiative, and student feedback after our first session. Other than that, we have a portfolio ready in form of social profiles that we can pitch to the field professionals and students.

Update: We hosted our first session on October 1, 2021 and broadcasted live on our Facebook page. We were able to get 25 registrations and were able to get a total of 8 students in our session — 7 students tuned in to our stream link and 1 student attended session from Facebook feed.

We also featured a guest speaker, Usama Shehzad Cheema, Student of Law and Founding Member of Medicose Educational Counselling. Since it was an introductory session, he shared valuable knowledge and personal experience on the significance of career counselling.

All the promotion posts and live session video can be found on our Facebook page.

Project Sustainability

We plan to get on board very talented and renowned people as guest speakers for our sessions. This shall ensure maximum reach for our platform and help us in sustaining this project for a long time. We aim to conduct at least one counselling session every month after this Fellowship program completes.