UNICEF, 13 state governments, and the private sector have customized career portals in regional languages. Thus, it reached 21 million adolescents, helping them access education, work-related resources, and opportunities. The career portals, on mobile apps, offer information on careers, college directories, courses from several countries, scholarships, and competitive entrance exams.

At the portal’s launch, Terry Durnnian, Chief of Education at UNICEF India, said, “The pandemic has heightened concerns among millions of young people about their future livelihoods and skills needed to thrive in the 21st century. UNICEF has supported career guidance portals across several states to empower adolescents and young people to make informed educational and occupational choices that support their social, financial and emotional well-being. UNICEF is pleased to partner with the Central Board of Secondary Education with the technical partnership of iDreamCareer to develop the CBSE Career Guidance portal to facilitate students in India to access information on career pathways, irrespective of their school affiliation.”

The CBSE-dedicated online portal on career guidance and counselling coincides with this year’s declaration of class X and XII results. It includes information on various careers, courses, scholarships, and examinations for students from grades 9 to 12. The CBSE Career Guidance and Counselling portal:

• Is gender-inclusive
• Informs on career options for unique ability students
• Uses a gamified approach to engage students
• Provides personalized and unique career journey through Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
• It is mobile, tablet, and laptop-compatible. The portal is linked to the CBSE leading portal.

All CBSE School students can sign up on the portal with their details and access a personalized career dashboard that will also be accessible to teachers and administrators.

The portal is linked to the CBSE leading portal. All CBSE School students can sign up on the portal with their details and access a personalized career dashboard that will also be accessible to teachers and administrators.

• The portal with the entire career curriculum will be offered to students at no cost.
• Currently, each student, through an individual career dashboard, will be able to access
• 560+ careers (English, Hindi & 8 other languages)
• 25,000 colleges and vocational institutes spanning over 3 lakh courses or 1200 scholarships
• 1150 Entrance Exams

Career Counsellor/Teacher Dashboard: 2 teachers/counsellors per school will be trained on the portal through a digital training session and given a personal counsellor dashboard to access the entire career curriculum and use it to guide the students’ career queries. This will build their knowledge base on career guidance. An additional 90-hour self-paced online training course will be offered to teachers/counsellors in their dashboard. They can do the entire course and get certified as career counsellors (after clearing the online assessments for various modules). This course is being developed with UNICEF support in the next few months.

As school learners come from diverse cultural, linguistic, social, and economic backgrounds, equal access to all is essential. CBSE will help create an enabling school environment to ensure an all-inclusive, institutional, solid support system for all students and teachers’ concurrent motivation and capacity building.

The recently set up Career Guidance & Counselling Information Centre (CGCIC) in CBSE will lend a hand to ensure a Career Counselling cell in every school, create awareness of the career portal to promote its usage among students, and also chalk out different offline strategies of providing uninterrupted guidance facilities to students.

Source: Press Note
Date: August 04, 2021
CBSE/M&PR/ 2021/CGC/RS/
Rama Sharma Head (Media & PR)