How C-HUB moved career counselling online when its studio had to close

C-HUB is a career information centre in Kerala. Its method was deliberately physical: a student and their parents sat together in a counselling studio, in front of a projector, and worked through career options on the screen. When the national lockdown closed the office on 22 March 2020, that room stopped being somewhere a session could run. Edumia built a bespoke career guidance and counselling application so the work could carry on without it.

The account below is drawn from the case study Edumia published about C-HUB. Nothing has been added to it, and no outcome is claimed that the published account does not state.

What C-HUB does

C-HUB is a career information centre for students and parents. It works with the technologies students are being asked about — artificial intelligence, virtual reality, augmented reality and robotics — and it guides students through career assessment tests, career workshops and mentoring sessions. The aim is not to hand a teenager a list of jobs. It is to help a student and their parents reach a decision together about which path to take.

The centre was founded by Mr. Shamveel, who started it after his own experience of choosing a career without enough guidance. Its physical setup was inaugurated by the magician and motivational speaker Mr. Gopinath Muthukad, which gave it momentum from the first day.

Why the studio was the whole model

The feature that made C-HUB distinctive was a room. It was a counselling studio with a projector, where a student and their parents could sit with a counsellor and see the career options laid out on the screen. In that room, the conversation had a shared reference point. Everyone was looking at the same thing at the same time, and the counsellor could point at it.

That is a strong model and a fragile one. A projector room cannot scale, cannot travel, and cannot open during a lockdown. When C-HUB grew quickly, the constraint that growth exposed was not demand for guidance. It was the room.

The lockdown, and the decision that followed

When the national lockdown was imposed on 22 March 2020, C-HUB had to shut its office and its operations stopped. The founder had built a reputation and a level of trust, and the choice in front of him was whether to wait the lockdown out or rebuild the service so that it no longer depended on the room. He brought the second option to Edumia.

It is worth being clear about why that is harder than it sounds. A counselling session is not a video. It is a conversation with structure: an assessment, a set of options, a decision. Moving it online means rebuilding the structure, not pointing a camera at the studio.

What Edumia built

Edumia built a bespoke application for C-HUB that serves as a career guidance and counselling system. The team started by developing the separate modules the centre needed, then added the functions that turn them into a single platform for career planning and guidance. With the app in place, C-HUB could offer its services online and reach students it could not previously reach in person.

The app was integrated with the following:

• Career guidance and counselling
• Expert advice
• A knowledgebase
• Live sessions and live webinars
• A discussion forum
• Career information and notifications
• Career workshops
• Cultural exchange
• Scholarship notifications
• Aptitude tests

A few of those deserve separating. The knowledgebase and the study material are content: they only help if a student can find the right page and open it on a phone, which is where most of these students would read it.

Live sessions and webinars are a different problem. They need an audience that has been told when the session is happening, and a channel that will reach them where they already are.

Aptitude tests are the third kind of thing. They produce a result that has to be recorded, compared and explained, which is a data problem dressed up as an activity.

None of it works unless the person on the other side is a known student with a student profile behind them, so the counsellor is talking to a person and not a username.

And none of it starts until a student enrols in a workshop or a programme, which is its own small process with its own records.

All of it sits on top of configuration work that has to happen first: the centre set up in the platform the way it actually runs, so that the app speaks in the vocabulary the counsellors use.

What counselling needs from a platform

A counselling platform is an unusual kind of software, because the session itself is a conversation and the value is in the record that comes out of it. A student arrives with a set of test results and a set of questions, and should leave with a plan and something to do next. Everything the app holds exists to make that exchange easier to run and easier to repeat.

That is why the application had to be built around how the centre works rather than adapted from a school product. Expert advice, a discussion forum, scholarship notifications, cultural exchange and aptitude tests are not the functions a classroom needs, and a tool designed for a classroom would have had to be bent out of shape to hold them.

The consequence is that going digital, for a service like this, is really a translation exercise. You take an experience that worked in a room, break it into its steps — assessment, guidance, content, follow-up — and rebuild each step so that it works without the room. Do that carefully and the students never notice the change. Do it carelessly and the room is simply missing.

What changed for C-HUB

The published account lists the impacts. With an app, students outside Kerala could reach the career guidance platform. Mobile access made the whole set of course content convenient to use. The C-HUB team was freed from repetitive tasks, which gave them time to work on new developments. Beyond guidance, additional resources were put at the disposal of students. Students could use the pandemic period constructively, and they could interact with experts and take part in live discussions.

The clearest of those is the first. A studio in Kerala reaches the students who can travel to it. An app reaches the student in another state, or another country, who has the same question and no centre nearby. The lockdown did not create that student. It simply made them impossible to ignore.

The second point is quieter and matters just as much. When the team stops repeating the same manual steps for every student, the centre gains hours. In a small organisation those hours are the entire capacity for growth.

The launch, and the client

The physical centre had been inaugurated by Mr. Gopinath Muthukad. The app was launched by Mr. Mohammed Basheer, a former Education Minister of Kerala.

Mr. Shamveel, the director who founded the centre, has described the team on the record as professional, experienced and responsive, and as present from kick-off to completion.

What an endorsement like that is really measuring is continuity. A centre that had to shut its office in March and was running sessions online within months did not rebuild its reputation from scratch. A platform carried what it already had into a place the lockdown could not reach.

What this shows

A service built on a room is limited by the room. A service built on a record can follow the student home. That is the whole of what changed for C-HUB: the same counselling, delivered through a platform instead of a projector, and available to students who never could have walked into the studio.

It is also a reminder that "going digital" is not one decision. It is a set of small ones — where the content lives, how sessions are announced, how tests are recorded, how a student is enrolled — and each of them has to be answered before the platform is worth anything.

There is a general lesson in the list of functions for any centre that sells an expert service. Guidance, expert advice, a discussion forum and assessment tests are four different kinds of work wearing one name. Guidance is a conversation; advice is content; a forum is a community; a test is data. Each needs a different shape on the screen, and bundling them under a single app is a design decision, not an afterthought.

The published account notes that the team took on the project despite being busy migrating schools and colleges at the time, because the concept stood out. Whether or not that matters to a reader, it says something about the kind of work this was: not a template applied to a new client, but a platform assembled around one centre and the way it counsels.