About & How to Use Career Counselling

1. My work: one queue of everything waiting on the counselling team30-Aug-2026

   Pending meeting requests, LOR requests, opportunity-completion claims and Lakshya points claims — across every student, oldest first, with a live count on the sidebar. Each row opens the student page where the decision is actually made; nothing is decided on the queue itself.

2. Career Pathways Survey responses are in the app14-Aug-2026

   The live Google Form’s answers for this year’s Grade 11 (139 of 186 students so far) now feed the strand’s aspiration fields automatically, and counsellors get a proper report at Career Pathways — top fields, top destinations, who’s using outside counseling, and a CSV export.

3. Recommendation letters: writer roles, Summer School, UK References13-Aug-2026

   A letter can now be teacher- or counsellor-written, cover a Summer School application (not just university), or be the UK’s single-reference format — each with its own slot cap. Students fill in a self-assessment before anyone starts writing.

4. Scholarships: counsellors can add and nominate, students can self-add to direct ones13-Aug-2026

   The write layer the page always promised. School-nominated and university-specific scholarships stay counsellor-initiated (slot-limited); a student can add themselves only to a “direct” scholarship, onto their own strand.

5. Psychometric reports: upload, and the figures extract themselves13-Aug-2026

   Upload a results PDF under a student’s Psychometrics tab; recognised formats (including the Career-Cluster interest profile) have their figures pulled out automatically, shown next to the original file so the reading can always be checked.

6. Comms: real email and calendar invites, opportunities newsletter, LOR reminders12-Aug-2026

   The app can now actually send — staff-only this phase. Every attempt (sent, failed, or refused) lands in the Comms outbox so “did the invite go out” is answered from the app, not someone’s inbox.

7. Meeting targets (Cadence) went live12-Aug-2026

   The team’s own promised meeting frequency, as data: every strand-holding student shown as behind / on track / done, with per-student overrides for a genuine exception.

8. Opportunities, goals, and the LOR request workflow, end to end12-Aug-2026

   The shared summer-school/competition catalog opened to every student; meeting-agreed goals became a first-class record; requesting a recommendation letter turned into a real workflow instead of a side conversation.

9. The whole counselling programme moved into the app01-Aug-2026

   Entitlements, the counsellor allocation spine, curriculum templates and group sessions, Lakshya (the selective track), and the parent’s read-only view all landed in one push.

10. The counselling process itself started living in the app, not just the record31-Jul-2026

    From Class of 2026 onward, applying/offers/rejections get entered here as they happen, using the same multi-offer system built for the alumni archive — the spreadsheet stops being the destination.

Written for a counsellor opening this for the first time — each section below is a feature area, the steps to actually use it, and a real screenshot of the screen it describes.

Find or open a student

Students is the roster. Search by name or FSK id, or filter by campus, grade, section, stage, target country, or counsellor — pick the (none) counsellor filter to find students nobody owns yet. Graduated cohorts are hidden by default (they’ve moved to Alumni outcomes); switch the view to see them. Click a name to open their strand.

The strand overview

A student’s own page (/students/[id]) is the one-screen summary of their whole journey: stage (exploring → building profile → applying → outcomes → exited), target destinations, profile progress, how many applications are in flight, stated course interests, and the counsellor’s aspiration note. Once a placement is designated, it takes over the top of the page as the final destination.

Record a meeting

From a student’s Meetings tab: log the type, mode, and who attended. The shared outcome is visible to the student and parent; anything in the private notes field is counsellor-only. A student can request a meeting themselves — confirm or decline it from the same tab. Link a meeting to a curriculum task to close it out in one step.

Search for a fit, and build the portfolio

Fit-search takes real criteria (country, subject, cost band, deadline type, application route) and returns a Reach/Match/Safety band — always shown as transparent arithmetic against each institution’s published requirement, never a probability or a machine score. Add a result straight to the student’s portfolio from the results list.

Applications, documents, and outcomes

On a student’s Applications tab, turn a portfolio choice into a real application, track document status (pending → requested → ready → submitted), and record an outcome as it comes in. Overseas submissions are gated on cross-border consent being on file. Once an offer is accepted, designating the Placement is the one deliberate act that marks a destination final — it’s never inferred automatically from an offer alone.

Recommendation letters

Requested from a student’s LORs tab: pick a writer (a teacher, or the student’s counsellor), the context (a university application or a Summer School), and the kind (a standard letter, or the UK’s single-reference format — each with its own slot cap, so nobody over-commits a writer). The student fills in a self-assessment first. Writers draft from My letters; content is never shown to the student or parent, at any point — see “Who sees what” below.

Scholarships

Scholarships is the catalog: add one with its deadlines and slot limit, then nominate a student by FSK id (school-nominated and university-specific scholarships stay counsellor-initiated, and nominating past the slot limit is refused by name). A “direct” scholarship is the one kind a student can add themselves to, from their own view of the same page.

Opportunities

The shared summer-school and competition catalog, open to every student. Bulk-assign a cycle to a group from Students, or let students claim one themselves from Opportunities — either path feeds the same enrolment record.

Career Pathways Survey

There’s no separate “take the survey” form in the app — the live Google Form is still where students answer it. What changed: those responses now flow in automatically, feeding each student’s course interests and destinations on the strand overview. Career Pathways is the counsellor-facing report built from the same data — response coverage, the most common fields and destinations this cohort is naming, who’s using outside counseling, and a per-student table you can search or download as a CSV.

Meeting targets

Meeting targets turns the team’s own promised cadence into a live dashboard — every strand-holding student shown as behind, on track, or done against the rule for their grade. Set a per-student override for a genuine exception; it’s dated and reasoned, never a silent skip.

What it covers

• Service categories (per-campus CONFIG — the Launchpad tiers) + year-scoped entitlements
• One longitudinal strand per student: meetings, psychometrics, Profile Builder, portfolio
• India first-class: JEE/NEET/CLAT/CUET routes, exam-based requirements and counselling-round deadlines
• Applications with the counsellor-document-submission workflow, outcomes, and the placement capstone
• Recommendation letters with the never-disclose wall; the teacher composer
• The Final Report (A–K), assembled live from canonical records
• The de-identified aggregate lane with minimum-cohort suppression

Who sees what (CC-16 / CC-21)

The AI posture

Everything here is deterministic and explainable: the Reach/Match/Safety band is transparent arithmetic comparing the student’s own number against each university’s published requirement (both always shown); gap analysis aligns the real record to targets’ published emphases with rule-based matching. No scattergrams, no admit-probability, no machine scores about a child — and no external LLM calls (the hosted-LLM drafting assistance of CC-24 waits on the governance gate).

Roles in this prototype

• counsellor owns strands — the full workspace including the interpretive layer
• teacher drafts and signs recommendation letters (their own only)
• student their own journey, factual layer only (the parent shares this view)
• lead the aggregate lane only — no individual strands, by construction
• admin ops + provisioning (but never LOR content)