LakshyaWiki:About
From LakshyaWiki
LakshyaWiki is an initiative of Project Lakshya which aims to help school students in India make smarter career decisions by creating a mechanism which will allow them to gain quality exposure to a variety of different professions by connecting them with experienced professionals.
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The need for career guidance
“Education is the manifestation of the perfection already in man” - Swami Vivekananda
India is the twelfth largest economy in the world and has seen an unprecedented rate of growth in the last several years. It is one of the fastest-growing large economies in the world, driven by one singularly extraordinary asset: its people.
Yet for a country that sees such dynamic dedication in its workplace, there is still a significant lack of career knowledge and follow-thru among its youth. Students are rarely exposed to the array of options that other countries take for granted and often pay little attention to the opportunities that can be made available to them.
Typically students spend very little time on career decisions (in the best case this could be 3 hours during one’s entire time at school, which is less than 0.02%). These decisions could have a profound effect on not just their own futures but on their families, friends, and communities. As such, Indian professional schools such as IIT have seen a steady rise of applicants with no concurrent increase in acceptance rates (it was only 3.9% in 2005).
Students simply don’t know what their options are and find themselves so bogged down in competition that they struggle to think and act independently.
Questions such as: “What do I do?” and “Where do I go?” are often met with silence and confusion, when they should be attacked head-on. If this is what faces the fortunate few who possibly get the best of Indian school education, then what should we expect from millions of those who were not born fortunate enough to go to school?
Our aim
Career counseling in India has enormous potential. By helping students prepare for their future, we can help make the Indian education system a more efficient and effective institution for change. In today’s fiercely competitive environment, every student has the potential to become a confident, internationally competitive, and independent stakeholder in India’s future.
Unfortunately, while many schools, teachers, parents and students understand the need for career counseling, at present options are very limited. There are few dedicated books and newspapers and only a handful of trained career counselors. Further, the current career counseling infrastructure lacks both quantity and depth, making it useless for students and schools alike. As a result, students often make superficial career decisions on the basis of peer pressure, secondary information sources, and luck.
Our efforts
Kapil Rawat started Project Lakshya in 2005. It started as a 4 page simple web site which talked about the concept. The site evolved to allow every consultant a message board, where we expected students to post queries directly to the consultant. This site can be accessed at www.lakshya.net.in/site/index.htm By April 2009 we had more than 600 volunteers in 17 countries. However, there were only 27 students and hardly any discussion on message boards of consultants.
In April 2009, Kapil Rawat relooked at our approach and figured that the site was not popular with students because most students at school do not even think of their careers outside the mould provided to them by their environment, and while we had provided them a platform to connect with professionals, there were not self motivated to use it. Students first have to be shaken into realizing the importance of their career decision and immediately after provided with relevant information. To do this we should become proactive in supplying information. Influenced by the success of Wikipedia, Kapil developed the concept of this LakshyaWiki which aims to accomplish precisely what we missed in our earlier initiative.
Way ahead
This LakshyaWiki was launched in May 2009. It is our second attempt at solving the problem of career counseling in India. We are committed to our efforts and we will keep trying till we solve this problem. Please join hands with us.
Jai Hind!
