Students from vulnerable sections to get free Gamified experience for career decision-making

New Delhi : Career Quest, an immersive and experiential career exploration game for adolescents offers exposure to different career journeys and is now live and freely accessible to learners. The gamified experience has been developed by a leading non-profit organization Quest Alliance to help students coming largely from vulnerable sections of society navigate different career choices. The Career Quest game is available in Kannada, Odiya, Gujarati, Telugu, Hindi and English.

The 'Career Quest' helps students rehearse various career scenarios through simulations and evaluate the role of gender stereotypes, peer pressure and parental negotiations in their decision-making process. The game is specially designed to help lakhs of students from low socio-economic sections who struggle with career path navigation.

Speaking about the game, Aakash Sethi, CEO of Quest Alliance said that the game aids in bringing out dilemmas that influence career decisions and allows a student to play out different scenarios in the process of career exploration.

The characters are drawn from different cultural backgrounds to suit different socio-economic and cultural backgrounds of students. The students can choose male, female or transgender characters. There are a total of 8 characters to choose from. The game has been tested with over 1,000 students across the country and is found to be very effective in helping students make informed career choices and understand likely feedback from parents, peers and society on their choices.

The game helps a student try out different career choices while making choices at every stage while bringing out dilemmas that the character faces while making a choice. Career Quest can also help students evaluate how parents, siblings, friends and relatives in a particular socio-cultural background would react to their decisions and choices.

Sethi said, "Many students struggle to evaluate career options and navigate through various career scenarios. Lack of exposure, gender stereotypes, peer pressure and parental negotiations make this journey a difficult one."

"Students understand the impact of their career choices and decisions only in retrospect and it would be too late to reverse their decisions. Career Quest is a simulator where they can rehearse potential real-life scenarios and make well informed career choices. This saves a lot of time and anxiety for students," added Mr Sethi.

The game can be accessed at https://careerquestgame.questalliance.net Lakhs of students in the network schools of Quest Alliance will use this game to make career choices. Quest Alliance is also in the process of tying up with many companies to roll out this game for students.

The game has also been featured as one of the top 100 most impactful and scalable education innovations from around the world by HundreED Global Collection 2024.