Learning Launch

Challenge:

I am a product manager in a financial product company. However, during weekends, I am involved in  an NGO which does a lot of work in the areas of enhancing learning outcomes and career planning  for High School and College students. Most of the students currently lack the necessary guidance,  mentorship or coaching in terms choosing the right career path (and related subjects of study. Herd  mentality, parents pressure or lack of guidance results in lot of students choosing wrong career  paths. This would result in de-motivated students and suicides in some extreme cases.

Selection:

The tool I have selected is Learning launch. The above-mentioned problem is complex and one-size  fits all type of solution will not be successful’’. This tool would enable the mentor/coach to run small  experiments or rapid prototypes to identify their interest areas and document the results for analysis.  For example, if someone is either analytical oriented or creativity orientated (The left and right brain  paradigm).

Application

The Learning launch process would be an App based solution. This would include small experiments  which includes Psychometric tests and other subject oriented tests to identify the strengths and  weakness areas. The data collected at multiple phases and student cohorts would give enough data  to validate a hypothesis or an assertion. The collected data results will result in personalized career  planning steps (based on the Psychometric tests other test results and one-to-one discussions  (which would obviously have a lot empathy involved in the process. The basic idea here is to identify  and define the problem rather than proving something right or wrong. At the end of the day the  proposed solution should be the best fit for the candidate/Student.

Insights:

The lessons learnt in this process include that quality of data and not the quantity matters. The  application of this tool helped to design assessment tasks for each student and validate these  assumptions (based on Psychometric test and discussions). This tool helps to reduce confirmation  bias as multiple small experiments/tasks are executed and results validated by multiple stakeholders  (including the student). The process of data validation is repeated n number of times till a common  ground is arrived at or a best fit is finalized.

Approach:

This tool will help to design a app based solution for career planning for students from diverse  backgrounds The learning launch experiments facilitated by the app would enable the coach to  identify the optimum career path (interest areas) for the student. The iterative Learning launch tool  would validate multiple data points and suggest to right career path of the student based on  application of learn launch techniques.

