Approaching 12th standard, I had to decide as what subject stream to choose for it, so after thinking for a while I decided to go with Science (PCM) as a subject stream for my 12th class. When I finally got into 12th class, now I had to decide as what course to choose for graduation, though this time due to lack of knowledge and guidance, I impulsively decided to become a computer engineer in future.
After completing school education, I matriculated at Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology, Shibpur (West Bengal) to pursue Bachelor of Engineering (IT). While pursuing it, I came across a business-plan competition that was being organized by NIT Silchar, but to appear in that competition, I must have had an idea to present, which I didn’t have. So I started thinking of an idea to present at the competition and while doing some reasoning on it I suddenly came across the problem of not being able to learn computer programming in the (BE) course I was pursuing and the reason behind it could be that the course was not at all appealing to me; therefore, I lacked in interest in learning programming languages. Similarly, when I asked my hostel mates as to why had they join their respective engineering branches? The answers astounded me. As most of them had decided to pursue engineering because of lack of guidance, parents’ unfulfilled dreams and indeed a societal pressure on choosing a risk free career. Those answers made me one thing clear that if we were given proper guidance and options to make a career choice and had our parent’s support, we would have definitely made better career choices today.
With this in mind, I pitched an idea to them where I would develop a web-based platform that would provide career counselling and mentoring to high school students. The platform would also include courses on entrepreneurship, law, computer science, etc. Over the next four years, I applied to a lot of business-plan competitions, also winning some of them. Along with that, I read up and did a lot of online courses on educational technology and entrepreneurship. Doing these activities, helped me realize my passion for education and entrepreneurship. I knew now I had to solve the problem of our youth of how to make a good career choice through my passion. This led to the inception of ProBano.
I started ProBano in 2017 and since then, it has been a roller coaster journey. We provide online and in-person career guidance to high school students, ITI students, and college students across India through our online content, psychometric tests, and in-person support. We have provided career guidance to more than 15,000 students across 15 states of India thus far and have been receiving a lot of support for our work since we started. As per the prior and post-guidance assessment conducted at ProBano, 74 percent of our students started career planning after receiving guidance. In future, we aim to become the first youth-centric Pan India career guidance venture. We want to cater to Tier I, Tier II and III cities, along with a strong presence in rural areas.
-Aditya Bose (Founder of ProBano)