New Delhi: The Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) and YuWaah (Generation Unlimited India) at UNICEF have collaborated to provide career awareness and guidance to IGNOU students. The first ‘Career Awareness’ session was held on January 17, 2023.
These sessions, conducted every week on Tuesdays, have seen over 4,000 views from students. In these sessions, students are introduced to new and emerging job search platforms to help enhance their employability. In the three sessions that have been conducted, students were made aware of platforms like JobHai, Apna and LinkedIn and were also given tips on how to network with an aim to find the right opportunity.
In addition to giving students a walkthrough of the portals, important information for freshers while entering the job market along with the best practices to follow while applying for jobs and preparing for interviews was also shared. Students were encouraged to explore opportunities on these platforms to widen their scope of securing a job in their preferred field of choice.
Abhishek Gupta, COO, YuWaah (Generation Unlimited) at UNICEF introduced a variety of offerings which could be accessed by the students. These include upskilling themselves on the Passport2Earning platform and exploring employability content on FunDoo, hosted on UNICEF’s interactive chatbot, U-Report.
Speaking on the occasion, Dhuwarakha Sriram, Chief of YuWaah, Youth Development and Partnerships at UNICEF, said “As a Public-Private Youth Partnership platform, YuWaah is committed to enabling access to economic opportunities for young people and assisting them in becoming job ready. We look forward to bringing many more of these career awareness sessions as well as new initiatives for the students at IGNOU.”
Students were also given a brief overview of the ‘YuWaah Step Up- Bano Job Ready’ programme, a soon-to-be-launched initiative for IGNOU students, which aims to support young job seekers in finding jobs that match their interests and skill sets.
Through the programme, young people are provided handholding support by expert coaches to build resumes, provided guidance on how to look for jobs, create profiles on job portals, apply for relevant jobs, and prepare for interviews.
Prof Nageshwar Rao, Vice Chancellor, IGNOU appreciated the initiative and exhorted the students to actively participate in the sessions. He hoped that this joint initiative shall play a significant role in empowering the students.
