2021 has been a year of immense growth and development. From envisioning a career guidance landscape with well-equipped career coaches to helping students discover their perfect careers…we are at the dawn of an era that seeks to bring forth a well-informed generation, making the right career choices.
With the year 2021 being a harbinger for the possibility of life getting its normal momentum, we had a phenomenal experience working towards shaping the career guidance landscape.
In this article, we will take you on a ride through this year of extraordinariness. Let’s relive the moments of excitement and move towards 2022 with a bang!
Let’s Start with the Achievements
As this season is all about everything sweet and nice, let’s start this write-up with the milestones that we achieved.
The Pre-Series A Funding Round
The year has been really fruitful in terms of ideating and thinking about the right track on which our stakeholders, students, and career coaches can get an edge towards achieving their aspirations.
What made this even more sizzling is that we closed our pre-Series A funding round of USD 1.5 million and welcomed our new investors Ecosystem Ventures, HVB 88 Angels, nVentures Singapore, Inflection Point Ventures, and The Chennai Angels; who joined our existing investors Taxmann Group and CIIE IIM Ahmedabad.
With this opportunity, we got the right boost that will help us further to expand our team and form new partnerships. Above all, it will allow us to think big about the different ways in which we can continue to be an active part in reshaping the career guidance landscape.
Mindler Immrse – Internships that Gets Virtual
This was probably one of the biggest highlights of the year, as we got the opportunity to empower our students with a unique value proposition to upscale their professional resume and bolster their overall profiles through innovative & immersive virtual career internships.
With Mindler acquiring Immrse, and it becoming an impactful part of our overall vision, we are now ready to provide a platform that can help students deep-dive into their preferred careers through simulations, role-plays, experiential videos, and a self-paced career discovery program. Our Virtual Career Internships are a cross between an educational course, a role-playing game, a master class, and practical work experience; allowing students to experience multiple conventional and new-age careers including Engineering, Medicine, Film Making, Graphic Designing, Law, Psychology, Ethical Hacking and more.
Featured in BW Business World
BW Business World is India’s largest and reputed fortnightly business magazine that has made its place in the market decades ago. This magazine showcases the latest trends in the business world, and talks about the emerging companies that will seek to shape the future of the country’s economy. It was a moment of great joy and pride when two of our Directors got featured in this magazine, getting placed on the front covers.
Mr. Prateek Bhargava, Founder and CEO, was listed among India’s Top EdTech Entrepreneurs, while Ms. Eesha Bagga Bhargava, Director – Partnerships & Alliances, was celebrated among the top women achievers who broke the gender barriers, encouraging other women to pursue big dreams.
This was not only about getting media coverage but was more about the recognition that addressed our mission to uphold a better and improved career guidance ecosystem in the country.
Holon IQ- 2021 India & South Asia EdTech
Holon IQ is the world’s leading impact intelligence platform that seeks to provide credible information about different social and economic institutions to Government, academia, firms, and investors in order to solve economic and environmental challenges. Their main vision is to provide authentic information through the use of different kinds of technology that will help to make powerful decisions.
In their pursuit to list out the top 100 EdTech companies, their band of intelligence unit team and market experts used the Holon IQ platform to sieve out the best from 5000+ EdTech startups from South Asia. This research included Holon IQ’s scoring fingerprint, which involved various factors such as capital, team, market, product, and momentum.
Mindler got a spot among the top 100, and we were featured for making it on the list, especially for upskilling, mentoring, career planning, and providing job-related solutions. It was a moment of pride when this acknowledgement, coming from a prestigious platform, helped us to validate the impact that we are creating in the market.
Career Workshops Start in Full Swing
The pandemic disrupted normalcy to an extend that getting back on the usual momentum feels unnatural. But, with the vaccines making its round, we got the opportunity to witness students in the premises of their schools, frolicking and chirping with the same innocence, while maintaining covid protocols.
Although we have taken tons of workshops with various schools all around, which were mainly online, let’s quickly go through an overview of some of the school workshops that we conducted throughout this year, offline and in hybrid modes.
Major Highlights
Now it’s time to check out the highlights of the year that we achieved.
ICCC Conference Reached its 50th
International Certified Career Coach (ICCC) is a program that aims towards giving the right guidance to aspiring career coaches in becoming fully equipped to mitigate the career challenges faced by the youths of today.
This is a 3-level certification program, which is credentialed by Mindler, Career Development Alliance (CDA), USA, and National Career Development Association (NCDA), USA.
The first level is called the ICCC Foundation, which is a 2 days free conference taking place every month with the sole purpose to help aspirants understand what it means to be a career coach and to evaluate their determination of becoming one.
After the Foundation level, aspirants can pursue the second level, which is called the ICCC Advanced, followed by the third level called the ICCC Masters.
We started off our virtual conference in the April of 2020, when lockdowns became a norm, and quarantine became a common word for everyone. We didn’t want this pandemic to intimidate our quest of spreading better career coaching awareness, prodding us to switch into the virtual mode. The determination of the participants also helped us to stay motivated at a time when every single social institution was crumbling down.
As time flew we saw participants crossing the threshold and shooting up. This year, in the month of November on the 19-20th, the ICCC hosted its virtual conference to its 50th Cohort. This was a major milestone for us, as we not only reached the 50th mark, but also could feel the impact spreading among our participants.
ICCC Launches its Overseas Program
Career Coaching practices that seek to expand beyond the national peripheries, gives one access to the global network, and an opportunity to outgrow the mindset from limited ideas. Especially as globalization continues to shrink the world into a united whole, it becomes important to reinforce career guidance skills that can help students to unleash their potentials, internationally.
With this idea in mind, we launched the ICCC Overseas Program, credentialed by Mindler, and Cognix, an organization, which is founded by Nirmal Agarwal, a Stanford Alum, that has world-class programs, helping students to pursue their study abroad dreams.
This program focuses on providing a holistic understanding of the International education landscape, along with the overseas application process, and profile building. It also gave the participants an in-depth overview of the overseas Universities, International University application processes, scholarships, and financial aid information.
We designed a robust curriculum that can help Career Coaches to set up their own independent practice as well.
Mindler Navigate Program
Mindler Navigate is a unique program, quintessentially designed for class 12 students to provide them with a platform from which they can continue to harness and enhance their skills.
With this program you can expect the pathbreakers to distinguish themselves from the crowd, exposed to a world filled with opportunities.
This program comes in two phases:
- Mindler Internship Program (MIP)
- Mindler Scholarship and Talent Hunt (MSH)
Phase 1: World’s Largest Internship Drive- Mindler Internship Program
We organized the world’s largest Internship drive, known as the Mindler Internship Program, where we give a chance to the students of class 12 to boost their professional profiles by completing a 5-week work-from-home internship. Not just that, the best performer gets the chance to avail rewards worth INR 10 Lakhs.
Phase 2: Mindler Scholarship and Talent Hunt
Every year we partner with major universities to provide amazing opportunities for the students that include scholarships worth over INR 25 Crores to students from 1000+ schools from India and the Middle East. With this initiative, we want to empower deserving students with the right resources that will help them to pursue their dream careers and become a strong force initiating change.
Conclusion
We want to stay optimistic about 2022, because it is going to be a positive year. Despite the threat of the pandemic, the year brings a ray of hope towards getting back the quality of life that we have all been craving for. We not only have vaccines, but also are gearing up for booster shots.
Moreover, this period of intense trial has shown us the power of being united towards the same cause and working for it together.
For 2022, we are looking to enhance and strengthen all our relations with students, parents, educators, and our partners, so that we can step into brighter days that are here to come. We will not only actualize our vision, but will also look for ways to go beyond it and achieve a milestone that has never been achieved before.
Today we will take this moment to thank all of you for trusting us. It is your relentless support that has helped us to be what we are today. We look forward to our association with you and believe that together we can make wonders in the lives of the students and the society.
Wishing Everyone a Very Happy New Year!