Career Platform ยท 2025
LAKSHYA
Lakshya is an AI-driven career guidance platform built for T-Hub, Hyderabad's flagship startup incubator, designed to democratise career planning for students and early-career professionals across India. The platform maps a user's current skills against target roles and generates structured, actionable roadmaps to close the gap.
The Problem & User Needs
India graduates millions of students annually, yet career counselling remains inaccessible to most. Generic job boards show vacancies but offer no guidance on the path from 'where I am' to 'where I want to be.' Students in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities have almost no access to structured career mentorship. T-Hub identified this gap and commissioned Lakshya to serve as a self-serve career intelligence tool โ one that could analyse a user's existing skills, map them to market-relevant roles, identify specific gaps, and present a prioritised learning roadmap. The challenge from a UX perspective was making a data-dense, multi-step process feel approachable rather than clinical.
Role & Contributions
Frontend Developer & UI Designer
Information architecture, interactive Figma prototyping, React TypeScript frontend, responsive layout, and T-Hub stakeholder presentations.
Worked with T-Hub domain experts and product leads through weekly review cycles.
Research & Design Process
The research phase involved competitive analysis of Google Career Dreamer, LinkedIn's Career Explorer, and Coursera's career pathway tool. Key finding: all existing tools presented overwhelming lists with no clear prioritisation. Users didn't need more information โ they needed a decision. I conducted five qualitative interviews with recent CS graduates to understand their mental models around skill gaps and career planning. The recurring insight was that users felt paralysed by ambiguity rather than lack of information. This informed the core design decision: Lakshya shows you three specific things to do next, not fifty options. The IA was restructured around a three-step flow: profile your skills โ explore matched roles โ get your roadmap. Node-based career trajectory maps were prototyped in Figma and tested across two rounds before the final visual language was locked.
Design Process
Three-step progressive disclosure: profile โ explore โ roadmap. No overwhelming dashboards.
Interactive node-based career maps in Figma, tested with users before implementation.
Two rounds of usability testing on the skill gap dashboard before handoff to development.
Measurable Outcomes
Delivered a high-fidelity prototype and working React frontend to T-Hub on schedule. Usability testing with 8 participants showed a marked increase in confidence about next steps after using Lakshya โ users reported feeling 'clearer about what to do first' compared to control sessions with job boards. The architecture was designed for AI integration: the skill-gap engine is structured as an API layer, making it straightforward to connect an LLM for personalised learning recommendations in a future release.