ConnectU

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Asking About Interests of Students
Processing Interest of Students
Suggested Degrees According to Students' interests and passions

Overview

Higher education and career choices play a vital role in an individual’s life. One has to be aware of his/her interests and abilities while taking an important decision of pursuing higher education which eventually leads to employment. This decision becomes more sensitive and important when one is planning to pursue a career in a developing country like Pakistan. One of the major problem Pakistan faces is unemployment.
According to the macro trends the unemployment rate in Pakistan has increased from 3.79% to 4.45% during 2016-2019. One of the factors influencing this increase is lack of career counseling. As per the statistics of Higher Education Commission of Pakistan, in 2014-15, 1,295,178 students got enrolled in 163 recognized universities across the country. This number has been increasing every year.

As the graph shows that this figure has been increasing every year. At the same time unemployment rate among university graduates has increased to 16.3% in 2017-18 from 5.3% in 2006-07 as per Pakistan Bureau of Statistics.
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Similarly, a research-based report ‘Graduate Employability: Employers’ Perception Survey Report 2018’ to assess the skills gap in Pakistani graduates was recently published to understand the employers’ satisfaction with Pakistani graduates and their abilities, which suggests that 78% of the employers are dissatisfied with the standard of fresh graduates in Pakistan. One of the major factors of this is that due to the lack of career counseling most of the graduates end up in a profession which is not aligned with their goals and abilities.

What it does

ConnectU is an online step towards saving careers of the youth by bridging communication gap between students of different levels in the country. The problem with the education industry in the country is that most students during their transition to university do not have access to professional counselling nor are they aware of the facilities, opportunities or various different career paths they are eligible for. In their desperate attempt to find answers they end up searching and asking on various different applications and websites. As of now, no service in Pakistan is dedicated to answering these specific queries and hence, information is distributed among various different sites and applications. To solve these issues prevailing in the society, ConnectU provides a platform targeted specifically for career Q/A which keeps information organized, promotes further questioning and provides opportunities for mentorship and career counselling.

How we built it

ConnectU is a web based platform. We built its frontend using Reactjs. At its core, it utilizes the power of REST APIs built with Django Rest Framework to communicate with the Postgres database. The servers are made a scalable solution using the container technology of Docker & Docker Swarm. The hosting platform is DigitalOcean, an IAAS provider which helps millions of developers to easily build, manage and scale their web applications. Most importantly, we built it with love and passion :).

Talent wins games, but teamwork wins ~~championships~~ hackathons.

Marketing Strategy

In order to solve this problem, we are introducing a web-based career counseling service in the market which will provide the students who are about to get enrolled in a university. This service will provide them with a platform where they can interact with the students currently enrolled in universities as well as professionals and alumni of different universities which will act as a mentor for them and help them in choosing career path according to their interests and abilities.
They can be approached by using a tool of digital marketing on the social media platforms and other search engines such as google. Building a community is an evolutionary process in this case, which can be done by using optimization tool of digital marketing in the beginning without spending too much on the marketing.

Creating marketing and buyer persons:
In the very first step of marketing our service, we have to define our customers which includes few important information such as age group which will be 16-18 years old, our customers will be the students who are looking to get enrolled in the universities for undergraduate degree programs, they will be targeted throughout the country, the most used social media platform i.e. Facebook will be used mainly to target these customers, the solution they are looking for from our business is already defined i.e. career counseling and getting the insight of what is suitable for them according to their interests and abilities from the people who have already been through all that journey.
The income bracket of this customer segment can not be defined properly as most of theses students are dependent on their parents or this can also be defined as the customers who can afford university education. One last thing which will be inculcated while developing this marketing campaign that how our customers search for these services online with the relevant keywords , those specific keywords will be targeted.
How will our customers find us?
By posting regular, high-quality blogs on our website filled with relevant content about the appropriate keywords and search phrases we will be able to capture clients and we will also acquire a higher page rank with search engines to enhance this campaign. The higher our website is ranked; the more people will see it and generate more traffic.
The regular blogs which will be updated on our website by keeping in view the mind set of the target audience and will be updated regularly. Optimizing search engines have minimal cost and they are effective especially in our business, this will initially help us in building community.
We will also be using Google Analytics which is a free tool that allows you to view data about how your visitors are using your website, this tool can be used to determine which blog posts on your website received the most traffic, which posts people spend the most time on and where the traffic comes from e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Gmail etc.
Newsletter, subscription and personalized emails:
Our website will include a newsletter or subscription option which will notify the visitor whenever there is a new blog posted and about the relevant services. Moreover, personalized emails will be sent and these emails will be automated which will ensure that these emails are according to the interests of the subscribers.
Great Customer Service:
In order to develop a good reputation, great customer service is of vital important especially in this digital age. We well be providing best customer service by giving some options like Live chat, Google meet calls, Social media, Emails and FAQ’s. This will enhance our customer support.
Tracking results:
We are using digital marketing to create brand awareness, service promotion, building an audience and capturing leads. In order to make this business and marketing successful, we would track and measure the results on regular basis to ensure that our marketing strategy is going in the right direction and what changes are required. This will also help in saving cost and time.

Sustainability and Scalability

Our first goal is to build a community which will enable us to further enhance this service. This business can be sustained in the long run in the following key points:

Charging an amount of Rs. 500 per customer.
The mentors will be paid according to the number of customers they provided service to per day or per week.
As most of the target audience (16-18 years old students) do not have a bank account, so they will be enabled to pay through Jazz Cash and Easy paisa services.
In the long run, we can collaborate with the universities/colleges and assist them in providing career counseling to the students, this will increase number of customers and will have direct impact on the revenue.
Gift vouchers can be arranged for the mentors by collaborating with Careem, Uber, Food panda, Cheetay and different kind of services.
Moreover, we can collaborate with Ministry of Education to create awareness and importance of our service and how it will have direct impact on the workforce in the market, which will eventually result in producing more skilled and motivated workforce for the country with a major economic impact.
Different employers/professionals can be reached for collaboration to create awareness of the importance and impact of career counseling services. Research articles can be shared online to show the main objective of this service i.e. improve people’s quality of life and chances to enjoy decent as well as meaningful life.