Career Anna is a large curated online platform in India that helps students and professionals acquire the knowledge and skill-sets necessary to, amplify their careers. It aims to empower over 500 million students and in a short time span has impacted the lives of more than 25,000 students and professional.
Varun Saxena is the founder of Career Anna, India’s largest curated online platform that helps students and professionals acquire the knowledge and skill-set necessary for growth in their careers. A B.Tech degree holder from NIT Allahabad, Varun went on to complete his MBA from NITIE Mumbai, followed by an entrepreneurship course from HBX-Harvard Business School.
A thought that arose out of passion, Career Anna is a result of certain observations made by Varun while scrolling through other similar portals. Having been the part of various career portals, Varun felt that no single platform caters to the needs of any domain, be it MBA, Banking or Engineering.
There are some platforms that provide a forum for peer to peer communication while there are some that provide notifications, announcements and updates with some expert guidance. To address this gap, Career Anna was launched in March 2014. It serves as the one-stop solution for end to end career cycle and evolves a faithful community like engagement among all candidates.
Varun brainstormed and argued a lot with the team over name selection. It was one of the most memorable days, as Varun says. The team wanted a name which can connect with the students as well have an essence of a big brother. Students trusted for credibility and ‘Anna’ meaning big brother served these needs very well.
In addition to the base team, Varun gets helping hands from around 10 people from similar industry, IIMs and other top B-School graduates. All of them help Career Anna as volunteers, as and when the need arises. Selfless hard work by these people helped Career Anna to grow unexpectedly.
Varun says, ” I will say every day throws a new challenge to us, with most difficult part of the day being when we need to go to the drawing board to ideate, debate (err almost argue among each other) and see what best can we do for creating engagement across different careers.”
Students from different career domains are far different from each other and the needs and behaviours vary. Career Anna is trying to address the different aspects simultaneously and that is difficult but it brings the excitement of a kind with it. Varun is a hater of monotonous life and the difficulties and challenges keep him going.
Career Anna has raised structured financing if Rs 3 crore in April from a group of angel investors represented by Subinder Khurana. Subinder is currently a Member of the Board at TiE Delhi, member of NASSCOM Product Council, and was earlier the Chair of TiE Entrepreneurship Nurturing Program and a NASSCOM-Emerge Mentor.
Career Anna is blessed to be appreciated daily by 15k to 18k MBA community members, 8k to 10k in Banking and around 5k in Engineering on an average. As far as college penetration is concerned, Varun has partnered with IIM A, SPJain, XLRI, NITIE, SCMHRD and few other top B Schools for their events. In addition, Career Anna have been engaged with the majority of top 15 B Schools through means of projects etc.
Varun wants to keep working to take Career Anna nearer to the level where they achieve the community engagement for career growth (aspirant, student and professionals), provide end to end career solutions for a plethora of career domains and hence add value to the lives of people around.
