Think Smart - identifying the right career pathway for you

Introduction

Think Smart - Founded as a solution to the lack of quality careers advice for young people, Think Smart aims to help individuals from all backgrounds in finding their ideal career path, through the use of an online platform. The start-up takes every-day workplace problems from a range of careers and turns them into multiple-choice scenarios to prepare young people for the world of work. Students are able to explore real-world situations, and ultimately receive personalised recommendations tailored to their skills and interests.

Rohin Aggarwal - Rohin is the Founder and CEO of Think Smart. His experience spans asset management, public policy and management consulting, and he has been a Governor at one of the UK’s largest further education colleges for six years. Rohin holds an MA in Economics from King's College, University of Cambridge and an MBA from INSEAD where he lived both in France and Singapore.

In this interview, Rohin shares his perspectives on how career pathways will evolve over the coming years, and how students can develop the necessary knowledge and skills to be successful in the economy of the future.??

Q&A

What inspired you to start Think Smart?

Firstly, I didn’t enjoy most of the jobs I’ve done, and I wasn’t necessarily great at them either. For example, I sat on a trade floor after business school, and felt that I’d taken up another job because I thought I ‘ought’ to do it, rather than because I enjoyed it or was good at it. I then reflected on careers advice that I’d been given at school, undergrad, and business school, and realised that it had been terrible across the board. I don’t think you’ll meet anyone on the street that will tell you that they had really great careers advice. This was the initial inspiration; that people are getting the wrong type of information, or making decisions that often lead to unhappy career decisions.

The second point for me is that employers don’t have enough of a say in the curriculum, and I felt that careers advice is an obvious place where they can provide input. From an MBA perspective, I remember saying in business school that actually the curriculum should be written more by employers. So this was the other half of the equation, to really make use of employers to give good careers advice.?

Why should students use Think Smart? What makes Think Smart special in comparison to other careers services platforms?

Our unique point is that we are a content platform. Every problem on our website is sourced from someone who is doing the job right now. If someone is confused about what career they want to follow, they can go and solve problems written by the professionals. No one else in the market is doing careers guidance in such a manner. This really is the most important thing about our platform. If a student is confused or not quite sure about what their career path might look like, they can go on our platform and work through scenarios written by people who are doing that job on a day-to-day basis. The student can then use that to gauge both their interest and aptitude for certain careers.?

What has been your impact so far, and what’s next for Think Smart? Are there any exciting updates or expansion plans that students should look out for in future??

We’ve done focus groups and trials of up to 5,000 students now, and have got a wide range of positive anecdotal feedback. We have since then also spent a lot of time dealing with business to business (B2B), and have worked on pilots with organisations such as Unilever, Kaplan and others in the UK, rest of Europe and Asia.

In particular, we are focusing on corporates and organisations which have direct access to students, as we believe that otherwise students might not necessarily use it. For example, we launched a product for students in Singapore, and we did that in partnership with Kaplan’s University. This provided us with direct access to students, and so we didn’t have to spend lots of time and money marketing it to them. Whereas if we tried going directly into a high school, since careers advice is often seen as a ‘nice to have’, we’re just not convinced that anybody would use it.

"the core online platform that is currently available on our website will continue to be free for anyone to use"

At the same time, the core online platform that is currently available on our website will continue to be free for anyone to use. For example, recently we gave the tool for free to a school in Kent. A total of 100 students used it, and they solved nearly 1,000 problems during that day and that’s great. Going forwards, we’re focused on our corporate outreach. But for students I’d say, go on it and have a play, and I believe it will definitely help them.?

What will careers pathways of the future look like? As we transition towards the Gig economy and increased switching between careers, what are the skills and behaviours that students will need to be successful in the future workplace?

This is a really interesting point, and is actually something that we’ve directly built into our platform as we emphasise everything by skills, as opposed to specific jobs as such. We believe that people often get hung up on particular job titles, whereas actually if you’re good at critical thinking, numeracy and people skills, you’d probably be fit for any job. It is still really quite depressing that you get 21 year olds who say: ‘I want to be a Management Consultant’ or ‘I want to be an Accountant’, without entirely considering why they want to do that. Whereas they may be able to use those skills to do something more meaningful or more robust in the long term, if they took a step back before zoning in on specific job titles.

"people often get hung up on particular job titles, whereas actually if you’re good at critical thinking, numeracy and people skills, you’d probably be fit for any job"

You also get students at the blue collar end, going into careers such as bricklaying, which are going to get automated very quickly. However if you initially take stock and think; ‘what are the skills that a bricklayer uses’, this can be very helpful. For example these skills include: attention to health and safety, communication, and teamwork. You can actually see that those skills are also used by careworkers, and we know that is a job which is only going to be in higher demand as we go forward. We can see that using a skills-based approach is really important as this will show you where good transitions can happen. For example if 1,000 steelworkers get laid off in Wales again, you can ask; ‘what are the skills that they have’. You can then use this to develop a transition to the nearest matched career.

Also in terms of specific skills that will be in higher demand in future, from talking to employers it becomes clear that skills such as critical thinking and numeracy will absolutely be up there. This comes as no surprise, but equally I don’t think that this is something which is emphasised enough. Essentially if students have good numerical skills, good critical thinking ability and also people skills, then they are likely to be well set. Also on the business side, one thing we found is the importance of a risk-taking mindset. From doing trials with corporates, we learned that a lot of corporate employees don’t have the same attitude towards risk as perhaps entrepreneurs or others. It is an important life skill to have in a corporate workplace, to allow individuals to feel like they can make mistakes, because otherwise it can be very difficult to move things forward.

If you could give one piece of advice to your younger self, back when you were in school, what would it be?

It would probably have been to not get so obsessed with degree choice. Our school system is geared to narrow you down over time. As you pick your GCSEs and then your A levels, you narrow down your subjects so much you often think: ‘oh well I should really consider what degree I want to do’.?I would have told myself to do the degree that I actually wanted to do, rather than the one I thought I ought to do. Most students have not had the opportunity to critically assess their career preferences before making such important decisions.

"the reality is that most graduate jobs don’t ask for a specific degree subject, and so really you can do anything in most cases"

My career path could and would have been maybe exactly identical if I did the degree that I actually wanted to do. Perhaps a couple of the finance jobs I did may not have been so easy to get, but everything else I could have absolutely done with a languages degree. Students are often given the impression that they need to do a specific degree to do a particular job, but the reality is that most graduate jobs don’t ask for a specific degree subject, and so really you can do anything in most cases.?

I also think that being open minded about what the link is between your skills and interests, and jobs, is really important because people don’t realise how many different career paths are out there that they could do. They often just go on things that mum and dad have told them, and they may well not be aware of what’s going on out there right now. I realised this from the number of times we’ve done trials with students and they come to think: ‘oh I didn’t realise that I could go and work in the same type of job but in a tech firm’, or ‘I didn’t realise that there’s a job role out there called UX Designer’. There are a lot of options out there, but unfortunately people just wouldn’t know as the information isn’t always available or easy to find.?

Resources

Access the Think Smart platform and learn more about Rohin Aggarwal at:

• Think Smart
• Rohin Aggarwal