Career Disha Nepal is a project initiated by VHS Bhaktapur, working as a Community learning from 2011 to present and has close contact with the local youth. Based on many informal discussions with our students, VHS Bhaktapur decided to work on the issue of career and education planning.

The choice of students regarding their higher studies or their further education after grade 10 is often driven by wrong mainstream ideas and superficial knowledge about existing jobs and possible job in the labor market. Some job sector such as Management, Medical and Social Studies boom whereas big lack in many other fields.

With a purpose to know how students are familiar to the available job market of Nepal, study was carried out in both village and cities of Bhaktapur in 2013. Study has been done to 800 students of Bhaktapur district in public as well as private schools together with a Swiss psychologist Betina and Nepali team. Result of the study illustrated that 50 percent of 800 students listed the same five professions as their dream job Doctor (12.3%), Nurse (12.3%), (Computer/Software) Engineer (10.4%), Businessman (7.7%) and Army (6.9 %) respectively. Research showed that many of them had trouble in identifying the correct education in relation to their desired job.

Furthermore we conducted market survey to both parents and students located in urban and rural area of the Bhaktapur, with purpose to find out the market demand services and reasonable price to all parents.

The parents market survey showed that more than 80 percent of parents interested in our services, most preferred product is Career Workshop 85.71 percent followed by Individual Counselling and then Online Assessment. On the other hand the student market survey showed that highly interested services was career workshops, online assessment and individual counselling 89 percent, 82 percent and 78 percent respectively.

Similarly, we conducted research among existing Career Counseling Organizations located in Kathmandu valley and their services. Those agencies provide individual counseling and integrated workshops limited to the orphanages supported by foreigners and few economically advanced youth due to the price and geographical location. It vastly excludes the rural population as well as poor families and often neglects Career paths going in the field of TEVT.

Based on this we decided to go with our efforts in the direction, which can provide an affordable service to a huge number of students not exclusively, but also from families, which are not in favor of being reached by existing services because of their regional or economical circumstances.

A look into the Career Counseling offers of European countries showed that using a computer based testing system would fulfill all this requirements and has shown huge success in the past. Bringing a scientific, psychological test together with technology by using a complex logic makes an automatic analysis possible. Therefore we can provide a high capacity of test in reasonable and marginal prices and from this the decision to go for a computerized online and offline Career Counseling service was born.

By beginning of the 2016 CDN has created a huge amount of data on education and job profiles available in Nepal. As the project aims to be most scientific we are partnered up with Social Science Baha who is helping for data collection and analysis to ensure a valid ground for the description of the 350+ profession identified.