Tarun Bhardwaj is a 25-year-old student. He has recently cleared the entrance examinations for the PGDM - Communications program at Mudra Institute of Communications & Advertising (MICA).

Background

He took PCM with the belief that it would open up more career options for him after class 12th, which led to the natural choice being Engineering. However, it soon dawned on him that Engineering was not what he had made it out to be, as it didn't excite him or give him something to look forward to. Thus, he decided to drop out of it after 2 years of the course.

Subsequently,he joined School of Open Learning (SOL) to pursue B.Com and started assisting his father's business on the side. While these activities kept him busy, he felt he was not doing anything substantial and could not see himself doing them for the next 10 years. The need for something better and meaningful constantly bothered him. Yet, he didn't know what it was or how he would get there.

His constant dissatisfaction with his situation pushed him to look for solutions. That is when he approached Mindler.

How We Helped

To help him, we focused on two main areas:

1. Making him aware of all the options available to him going forward, and helping him choose the best one out of them.
2. Helping him recover from the effects of his past decisions and progress on the newly discovered path to achieve success.

It was thus critical to find what careers would suit him the most. Since he had never really given much thought to what he was good at, we started with an evaluation of his strengths, interests and capabilities through our career assessment to get a clearer picture of his best-fit careers.

Career Assessment - Understanding Tarun's Strengths & Abilities

The assessment evaluated Tarun on various elements important for making a career decision, including his interests, personality, aptitude, emotional intelligence and orientation style.

The results of the assessment revealed that:

1. He was a highly people-oriented person and liked interacting with and being around people a lot. He would be effective in work settings requiring him to deal with people.
2. He had excellent communication skills and verbal abilities. His command over language was good, and he was comfortable interacting in social settings.
3. His ability to persist in achieving his goals and tasks he picked up was low at the moment. This was most likely the result of his present circumstances.
4. He was good at thinking creatively and coming up with new and abstract ideas and concepts.

On the basis of his results, the career assessment suggested 5 career recommendations to Tarun, namely:

• Media & Communication
• Social Services
• Education & Training
• Social Sciences & Humanities
• Applied Arts

Following the online assessment, Tarun met our career experts face-to- face for his counselling sessions.

Addressing Concerns and Suggesting Options

The first step in guiding Tarun towards the right path was to gain a deeper understanding of his current situation and the circumstances that led him here. He voiced his concerns about his drop out and felt unsure if he had the right age or qualification to pursue further education and career. His situation had caused him to lose out on his self-confidence. It was important to acknowledge his misgivings first and make him understand that it is not too late, and with the right steps, he can be back on a successful track. We supplemented this with real life examples of students who had undergone similar situations to his. This helped Tarun to be less apprehensive and more open to exploring options.

As the next step, we discussed his assessment results and helped him compare and evaluate each of the career recommendations to understand the specifics of each field- what work people do in the field, opportunities and scope of each field, the path he would have to follow, etc.

Based on this understanding, out of his 5 career matches, Media & Communication particularly piqued Tarun's interest. His assessment results revealed that he was suited for a field that requires social interaction, good communication & language skills, as well as a flair for creativity. Hence, we judged that this could be a qualified choice for him.

During the course of the session, Tarun had also revealed that he wished to gain skills he could utilise in his father's business, and be in a leadership position in a few years. We thus suggested him to look at a few different programs in both the domains of business and media & communication to explore and understand what he likes. To this end, we recommended him the following types of programs in both India and abroad:

• MBA programs
• Mass Communication programs
• Programs which provided a combination of the two

Finding the Perfect Course & Career - Finalising Choices

After carefully researching and reading up in detail on the programs shared with him, Tarun found the Communications Management program at MICA to be quite exciting, and shared that it was something he would want to do in the longer term. On the counsellor's suggestion he had examined the syllabus structure and placement records of the course, and had made up his mind to pursue it.

We explained him how a Management Communications program would open a diverse range of options for him in the associated fields of Marketing, Public Relations, Campaign Management, Branding, Advertising, etc. across various industries. Not only that, it would provide him with a great opportunity to combine his aspirations for business, and his strengths for the field of media and communication. Public Relations was one field that he particularly liked, and one that he was also well-suited for, as brought out through the assessment results and our discussions with him. After evaluating and comparing various aspects of the program and its benefits for him, Tarun decided to target the program at MICA.

The next steps entailed helping him build a strategy towards achieving that goal.

Achieving the MICA Goal - Continued Support & Strategy-Building

The MICA selection process consists of two elements: Entrance Examinations (CAT & MICAT) and Interview.

To focus on the first part, we suggested Tarun to enroll himself in coaching classes for the CAT exam, which would help him build a base for the MICAT exam as well . We also discussed the structure of these exams at length and helped him build a strategy for approaching his preparation and dividing his study time.

For the second part, the interview, a major step was to address Tarun's concerns regarding his profile and gap years. He was bothered with the thought that the other applicants will be better or more qualified than him, since he was a dropout and had no background in the field he was going for. We explained that what he would do now would matter more than what he had done in the past. It was more important to project his past situation in a certain way and build a compelling story to convince the college selection board regarding his application.

Another important step to achieving his MICA goal was to build a strong and solid profile, which is a major selection criteria for applications. To select the right set of opportunities to target, we first gained an understanding of what he enjoyed doing, and led it from there. We decided on the following activities to build up his profile:

• Internships in the fields of Public Relations, Advertising and related areas.
• Online certification courses for Public Relations, Communication and Digital Marketing.
• Leadership Clubs

To help him achieve these we also suggested him companies where he could look for internships, list of courses he could pursue, and assisted in building his resume to target internship opportunities.

Over the course of the subsequent months, we have regularly assisted him with his strategy and provided him support for his preparation and profile-building efforts.

Outcome

Tarun has now successfully cleared the MICAT exam and feels extremely positive about his chances of clearing the final stage (interviews) to get through to his dream college. At the same time, he is actively building up his profile and does not feel apprehensive about his future anymore. He has regained his confidence in his abilities and truly believes he has found what he was looking for.

Tarun had enrolled in the Mindler Explore program for Career Selection & Development.

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