CDN 2.0

Firstly, a great thank you to the initial team

Thanks to the very engaged team CDN has achieved a lot in the last 5 years.

We do have an online and well running Job & Eductional Database, have conducted our psychometric assessment over 1100 times in various places and for very different clients and received a very positive feedback every time. (see our annual report section for more details)

Despite all the success we have had in the last years and the great feedback we received from all clients we have served, we are still struggeling to become financially stable. Sales have not been as expected and the overhead costs to keep the whole project team have eaten up all reserves which we have made.

Therefore this summer has brought a huge change in the overall structure of Career Disha Nepal.

We like to compare the old team with a catarpillar, who has been growing and had its role to play in grooming the organization ...

After much considerations and many board meetings and discussion with all team members, interns and volunteers we have made the hard decision to discontinue having a big team and rather continue with a slim core team, whic focusses on reaching out to more and new clients.

Old and New Roles

Hari, Inge and Saroj will continue in their role as board making strategic decisions for the organization.

Old and new team on a team building trip to Taudhaha with all board members and extended family ...

Nabina Phaiju, office manager of VHS Bhaktapur, will strengthen the team in regard to administrative works.

Directly below the board Nabina - managing VHS Bhaktapur successfully since a few years - will take a lead for all the operational works like administration, finance, marketing and communication with the help of Saroj, Hari and Kabita.

The second department active in Nepal will be the counseling department. Hari will take a lead in that sectore and Susma will help him. The department will be responsible for developing counseling material, conducting counseling and workshop and train career helpers on our tools. Also they will take over updating our job & educational database to the minimum which is required.

IT and technical works will be reduced to a minimum and taken care by Inge, working for CDN from Austria.

Inge will take make sure to maintain the website from Austria and improve the search engine requirements of the website. If required we will reach out to Patrick to add new functions to our page.

Among others we have decided, that we will not entertain a paid position for data collection and the maintenance of the database anymore. While we are still dedicated to keep our database up and running we can not entertain a paid position for that purpose till we are financially stronger again. We will try to get projects funds to run focussed and financed projects for boosting new data for our website in future. So if you are interested in supporting that aspect, we appreciate if you get in touch with us.

Also in the past we have provided internship and trainee positions for the IT and design department. It has shown to be very difficult though to suprvise trainee positions from Austria and to make use of that overhead costs in an efficient manner, so that we have decided to reduce these positions for the time being as well. Some of the interns decided to continue on a voluntarily basis, some others have taken that change as a starting point for their further academic education.

Shifting to VHS Bhaktapur building

Since June 2019 our office is located inside VHS Bhaktapur building on the second floor.

As many rooms in VHS Bhaktapur are vacant over long period, we have decided to shift our office in the second floor of VHS building (and reach lunch faster 😉 )

During peak times we an use the class rooms which are empty during most of the day for volunteers and bigger team gatherings.

the bigger picture

We plan to establish an umbrella organization which will look after VHS and CDN both.

The board also this change also as a chance to bring both offices VHS Bhaktapur and Career Disha Nepal a bit closer together again.

We are planning to establish a new umbrella organization soon, which should be above both VHS and CDN. As a first step the above described administrative roles are taken care by VHS admin staff. In a next step we plan to have those central functions in the newly established umbrella organization. .

Outlook & hopes for the future

As initially described, we see that as a new start with a slimmer team. We hope to be able to establish long time client relations with many educational institutions in the next years so to reach a financially stable base income soon again and be able to slowly expand our team again.

By mid 2020 we hope to be break even in regard to the operative cost again and then slowly build up additional positions again.

If you would like to support us with a monthly contribution starting from USD 1 per month, we appreciate your contribution on our Patreon page.

Become a Patron!

Trending vocational educations

[:en] Over the course of the last 4 years we have collected a considerable amount of data in our so called Educational Database. Our team and countless volunteers have been sitting and entering numerous boring sets of data so that we can provide you with more and more information. In November we sat down and we were asked the question: Outside the academic streams: which educations do offer most seats in Nepal. Here is what we have found for you. The training which has by far most seats is the Diploma in Nursing. Almost 140 Institutes all over Nepal are offering a total of more than 4000 seats. Prices for the Diploma range from Rs. 38 000 at the divine institute of health training & research Center in Nepalgunj to 9.5 Lakh at the Bheri Nursing College. The majority of the colleges is charging between 4 and 5 Lakh for the training though. The next trending course is CMA which is a short for for certified management accountant and is a certification for accounting professionals who have demonstrated ability in strategic management and financial accounting. This course lasts 2 years and 5 month and is offered in over 75 institutions all over the country. Fees do range from Rs. 9825 (at Rapti Technical School) to 1 Lakh. CMAs can continue an career as book keeper. The third ranked education according to the total amounts of seats is a Diploma in Civil Engineering which if offered by 47 colleges starting from Rs. 50000  in Seti Technical School.  This Diploma course enables students to work as civil engineer or overseer. Further non-academic educations with a high number of seats are the post-TSCL cours of Auxiliary Nursing Midwifery (ANM), Diploma in Health Assistant, the TSLC in Medical Laboratory Technology, JTA Plant - a basic training in agriculture and small entrepreneurship, TSLC in civil engineering, a Diploma in Pharmacy, Diploma in Medical Lab Technology and the Junior Technician Course in Agriculture, Veterinary & Lifestock. So all in all, there are many seats for educations in the sector of health, agriculture and civil engineering. All those seats are spread over 68 districts in Nepal. Check out the links above, which lead to further information on each education or contact us in case you have any futher question. If you are confused on all the great choices which lie ahead of your: Our online assessment helps you figuring out, which job and education would fit best to your personality and our career coaches are happy to advice you on your next steps.Call us now.[:]

[:en]Programming for the future of Nepal[:]

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CDN has put an emphasis on combining online and offline solution as an integrated part of our strategy. Even though we know, that internet is not yet such a common place as in Europe, still around 54 % of the population are meanwhile using the internet and the advantages lie at hand.

By collecting all the information about jobs and educations online, they can be accessed from youth workers, teacher and youth from all over the country without having to carry around heavy folders with the same information in printed. While developing we have focussed on keeping the pages simple, so that low band with in rural areas does not hamper users to surf our comprehensive online information.

The advantage of digitalizing the psychometric assessment was even clearer at hand. One of the principles of psychological testing is that the test is conducted under standardized conditions and analysed in a similar manner. Having the test online is guaranteeing that every test is conducted and analysed according to this standard.

For those students, who do not have access to infrastructure to conduct the test online we also have thought about a solution. Our partners can access a protected area on our website in which they have the possibility to upload questionnaires which have been filled in paper. During our first joint project they get trained on how to conduct the assessment, how to upload the answers and how to retrieve the result from the system. Clients also can choose to receive their results via email as a PDF in addition to receiving it printed from their local career helper and also can later on at every time log in to our system and review their results from an internet café or similar.

Last but not least do engaged teachers or youth counsellors have the possibility to purchase our services in bulk for a whole class or group of youth. It is possible through our collaboration with ESEWA to do so from all districts in Nepal. Packages as cheap as Rs. 200 can be purchased directly in cash at one of the 25000 ESEWA-Agents, who can be found all over Nepal.

In short we have used online tools to guarantee high quality and standardized results for our psychological assessment and to be able to reach out to whole Nepal without establishing a costly physical infrastructure in a first step. All this has been possible because of great team work in CDNs technical team and a joint vision of what we want to achieve and where online tools can help us achieving that goal. A special thanks once again goes to Patrick Menke who with a very high degree of accuracy as well as dedication makes our technical dreams come true.

There are still many wishes on our bucket list, which help us to reach out to even more people and support Nepal’s youth even more effectively with our service. Things such as having a mobile version of our assessment, having a full text search all over our database or statistics for schools about their student’s needs can help us to fulfil our mission to provide youth from all over Nepal with quality career counselling tools.

For that sake we are currently looking for software developers, who are ready to support our cause by donating some hours of their valuable working time for us. Please help us finding someone by sharing our campaign on betterplace.org.

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Field Report Jumla Research

Knowing the ground reality of the labour market is essential to provide quality career guidance for us. For that sake we have conducted a pilot field research in Jumla which had two aim:

Firstly, to gather more data about the potential of Jumla’s labour market now and in future. Secondly we wanted to test our core service: the interest based psychometric assessment in the setting of Jumla and assess the feasibility to work with local partner organizations.

Sagar working with Sushil Devkota on our Website

For that Purpose Inge Patsch and Sagar Ghimire have been traveling from 5.3.2017 till 13.3.2017 to Jumla. Sushil Devkota from RACE Nepal was our local contact point and helped us arrange various meetings as well as the workshops in the schools. We furthermore could use their local office as a workplace.

The format for assessing the labour market seems to work well. Further similar research should be conducted in other districts of Nepal got get a more refined picture of the labour market. In most interviews with government officials, they first would start to tell us the number of governmental employees. While training enumerators we should emphasize therefor that they dedicatedly ask their interview partner for employment in public and private sector.

In terms of data collection we could conclude, that the current format serves well to assess the demand in the labour market for most sectors. For further interviews we can note that especially for interviewing governmental officials it is useful to bring an official letter (partnership with ILO?) to access them as some of them were hesitant sharing their insights with them (we did NOT ask them any personalized data though).

Also this requires sufficient time in the field as it might take several days to get the appointment with the right person. It is important to report those officials who have been working in the district for a longer period, as most information were drawn from their memory rather than official documets.


Filming a short Video about social work with Keshab Dhital

The watchadoo videos were rather easy to produce as long as one does not strive for perfect video or audio. While the footage made outside was having an nice picture, it was a challenge to get the clear sound (even though we used an audio-device directly next to the person to record it. The inside video has the challenge of the worse lightening. People were spontaneously able to give the interview and we did all of them in a one shot. For some we repeated single questions in a second shot.

Conducting Labour Market Workshop in Bhoragau

The logistic of doing the workshops and taking the assessment in such remote areas is a challenge but doable. It requires sufficient time for processing. Assessments and Job & Edu Booklets are best prepared beforehand so to not have to rely on the online job & edu DB in the field.

A bigger challenge would be to find and to keep connected with local partners. We left the field without any specific agreements on any further cooperation. CDN would need to develop a clear concept on how local partners can overcome technical hurdles to use our system as well as how to train and prepare them. Last but not least we need to find organizations which dedicately are involved in career counselling and youth guidance and figure out which other tools they would need that the online assessment becomes a feasible instrument for their works. The development of a business case which works for CDN as well as for the local partners seems one important big next step.

Download full report

First Market Survey Insights

Career Disha is back on track. Still engaged in Post-Disaster work, we are slowly getting back on track again, with our career counseling programs. We know more now about our target group: girls from the village areas visiting a governmental school with less educated parents seem to have more interest (and probably also more need) for career counseling. That would be the fast conclusion of a market survey conducted by our team and summarized by our intern Sabnam Shrestha in the last months. SONY DSC Since, Nepal is a male dominated country, it is obvious that female are deprived from many opportunities. However, this has been changing rapidly in city areas. But there are still many places where female are not allowed to get out of their houses for other causes. This shows female population are in need of these tools more than male. And surprisingly, this has been true from our survey report as well. Female students are highly interested in our products than when compared to male students. All three products namely, Career Workshop, Individual Counselling and Online Assessment are mostly preferred by government school students when compared with private schools. Also students who are less or not interested are relatively higher from private schools. This shows that students from private schools are more aware about their career and are focused to their goals. However, those from government schools are in need of these products and would consider it for their career enhancement. Career workshop will be accepted by huge number of students if we consider both interested and high interested students. However, there is a slight increment in highly interested students for individual counselling.There are relatively more students who are interested for online assessment. Nevertheless, we should also consider students who are totally not interested with this product and comparatively they are higher than in other 2 products i.e. 11% interest_online_assessmentHence, according to our findings, highly interested and interested students for career workshops, online assessment and individual counselling are 89%, 82% and 78% respectively. So, the finding shows career workshop as the most preferred product among three. And the least preferred is individual assessment. All three products namely, Career Workshop, Individual Counselling and Online Assessment are mostly preferred in village area than in city area with 98%, 90% and 86% respectively. Also students who are less or not interested are relatively higher in city area. This shows that students living in city area are more aware about their career and are focused to their goals. However, those from village area are in need of these products and would consider it for their career enhancement. 32% female student and 16% male student prefer school for career workshop. 13% female student and 14% male student prefer other place. Similarly, for online assessment 28% female student and 12% of male student prefer home. There is also high percentage of students preferring other places for online assessment i.e. 21% female student and 15% male student. In the similar manner, 23% female students prefer home for individual counselling whereas 14% male student prefer community. Higher education is far lower than expected among both parents. Fathers are more educated compared to mothers. Illiteracy level of mothers is higher than compared to fathers. Maximum interested students belong to parents with education level up to SLC. The above chart shows us that students with illiterate mothers are more interested in these products than illiterate father i.e. 22%, 20% and 20% in career workshop, individual counselling and online assessment respectively. The finding shows that students with highly educated parents are not interested in career workshop. On contrary, students whose parents are highly educated or just have minimum education are more interested to use these products. In the light of these conclusions, the need of career workshop at school and individual counselling at home seems higher for female population from village area especially from the government school students whose mothers are illiterate.

Spiker-Solutions: welcome on board for Software related aspects

Spiker_solutionsWe are happy to announce our partnership with Jayanti Mala Chapagain and Durbar Gyawali from Spiker Solutions. Spiker Solutions became our full-partner for all software-related aspects of Career Disha. In the first project, they will design the technical support for data-collection as well as the interest based test. Spiker-Solutions is well established IT-company from Kathmandu focussed on solutions on desktop, internet and mobile applications. We are looking forward to a long lasting and fruitful partnership with them.

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Crowdfunding successful finishes with € 2500

[:en]Our crowdfunding campaign has been successfully finished and we are very happy to have collected more than € 2500. We want to send a big thank-you to all our supporters and will work on your perks in the next weeks.[:ne]Our crowd-funding campaign has been successfully finished and we are very happy to have collected more than € 2500. We want to send a big thank-you to all our supporters and will work on your perks in the next weeks.[:]

Have a look: Project report

Rebecca Walker a volunteer at the VHS Bhaktapur wrote this informative report about our new project "Career Disha Nepal". She also gives an overview on the subject of “Crowdfunding”. Read this and you get a good idea of what "Career Disha" is about and how it develops. Dear Reader: The report is in German. If you can't read German, but are very interested: Please contact us:  info@careerdishanepal.org / Regarding: Project report We will send you a translation in English. Thank you! Report_CDNepal_September 2014

Vacancy-Career Disha Nepal is looking for Senior/Junior Developers

Vacancy Announcement made for Senior and Junior Developer is timely completed. We are very happy to get numbers of response on the announcement. Currently we are in the phase of understanding the applicants and shorting out. We would soon contact the shortlisted candidates for final interview. Be patient and keep us tracking on our blog post and facebook.

Career Disha Team out for picture collections for Crowd Funding

[:en]Career Disha Team left this week for collecting material for the crowd funding campaing we plan to run in August this year. With crowd funding we hope to add to the financial ressources we already have. With a short movie, we want to tell our story to the rest of the world:
Saroj taking pictures for our crowdfunding campaign
Saroj taking pictures for our crowdfunding campaign
[:ne]Career Disha Team left this week for collecting material for the crowd funding campaing we plan to run in August this year. With crowd funding we hope to add to the financial ressources we already have. With a short movie, we want to tell our story to the rest of the world:
Saroj taking pictures for our crowdfunding campaign
Saroj taking pictures for our crowdfunding campaign
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