How The/Nudge motivated under-supported youth to build awareness on employability skills

Learner

Youth from low-income backgrounds in urban / semi-urban Karnataka and Tamil Nadu - states in southern India

Topic

Spoken English & Employability Skills

Format

Social Media - Instagram Reels

The/Nudge works towards poverty alleviation through multiple approaches, one of which is the skill development of the youth from low-income backgrounds to make them employable and enable their upward socio-economic mobility.

The lack of awareness among youth about today's job market is one of the critical problems that leads them to enter the workforce with inadequate skills or not take up employment altogether.

This case study explores how The/Nudge approached this problem in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu - two states in India - by designing relatable content and taking them where the youth are.

What’s Inside

Problem (3 mins read):
Deciphering the aspirations of youth 

Process (7 mins read):
Leveraging user preferences for success

Implementation (5 mins read):
Designing relatable, bite-sized, and relevant learning content

Impact (1 min read):
Motivation-fuelled organic engagement

Deciphering the aspirations of youth

Problem

The/Nudge had a 4-month online, trainer-led skill development program from 2020, providing placement assistance for private sector /service sector roles such as BPO and retail. There were many vacancies in the service sector, and the youth that The/Nudge catered to required a job. However, they observed that most students did not opt for job roles in the service sector, which was mind-boggling!

To understand the youth’s aspirations, they set out on the field in October 2021, doing qualitative interviews and user surveys. They also spoke to stakeholders like parents, teachers, and employment exchanges.

What were their key findings?

Fear of the unknown:

The youth in semi-urban pockets who lived outside the city or in villages and small towns believed that the “City was a bad place” inhibited them from seeking employment outside their hometown.

Limited job market understanding:

When asked about their aspirations, the youth commonly responded with statements like "I wanted a system job," "I aimed to become a bank manager," or "I planned to study for the PC (police constable) exam." However, upon deeper probing, many struggled to provide specific job details or required skills for these roles.

Low English language proficiency:

“I applied, but I was rejected for my poor English.” Their biggest struggle was their inability to speak English confidently and accurately, especially in interviews.

Limited or negative social proof:

“I know teachers and doctors but no retail executives”. The youth did not know anyone in their social or family circles employed in the private sector. This made them wary of employment opportunities they did not understand.

Lack of exposure:

Youth aspirations were shaped by family and peers, with many aiming for careers like police or IAS officers. Others, lacking awareness, sought guidance from college lecturers or seniors who led them towards government exam preparation.

From the interviews conducted by The/Nudge,

35% of the youth wanted only government jobs because of the 'security' it offered. These youth were unaware of why they picked a particular stream in college but were okay to do a Master's degree if it gave them time to crack government exams.
About 23% of the youth were completely unaware of what employment opportunities existed for them after college, either government jobs or private sector ones.

Through their research, The/Nudge uncovered that the lack of awareness and skills for employment were critical problems faced by the youth. A more latent problem that emerged was one of perception – that the youth and their communities had a set perception of what “secure” employment looks like, and this perception seemed to limit the kind of opportunities this group accessed severely.

So, despite running in-depth, trainer-led skill development programs, The/Nudge realised that they needed a more nuanced and targeted approach to address these problems effectively.

What did The/Nudge do about it? Let’s find out.

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Process

Leveraging user preferences for success

Here is how The/Nudge approached this:

The/Nudge came up with 3 major hypotheses on why the youth lacked awareness:
- The youth do not have enough information on employment-related skills available in their immediate surroundings
- The youth may not understand the information already available as it may be too complex for them and they cannot relate it back to anything they learnt previously
- The youth are not actively seeking out employment-related information outside their immediate surroundings and social circles
While the first two problems could be addressed through designing and distributing quality content, the third problem was linked more to the youth’s motivation.
If the youth are not motivated to seek out the information themselves, no matter how good the quality and dissemination of content is, it will not solve the awareness problem. This insight led The/Nudge to get curious about what the youth were naturally motivated to seek out.
During field visits, The/Nudge noticed how heavily the youth used social media. One of their assumptions at the start was that YouTube is the popular choice among youth from low-income communities. However, they quickly debunked this assumption and realised that, it was Instagram that they spent most of their time on!
But what about Instagram appealed to the youth? How did they use YouTube as opposed to Instagram? What kind of content did they consume on both platforms?
Here’s what The/Nudge discovered:
- Low adoption of long-form content: While relevant information existed on YouTube as well, the long-form nature of the content and monotonous delivery did not strike a chord with the youth.
- Need-based vs habitual access: Many people used YouTube on a need basis, such as when they had to search for information, before an interview (eg. how to make a resume), for exam preparation, or to understand concepts from their college courses. On the other hand, Instagram was used more frequently for entertainment purposes, with users spending an average of around 2 hours daily.
- Social platform: Instagram was seen as a social platform where they actively shared relatable reels and content with their social circles, whereas YouTube was mostly passive consumption.
- Relatability: Within Instagram, they preferred “reels” to everything else (like static content, stories, IGTV - which was still a thing back then). Even within reels, they had preferences - dancing, singing, dubsmash reels were popular, compared to animated ones, or ones that taught them something.
Seeing as the youth were already using Instagram daily, The/Nudge decided to leverage that motivation to meet them where they are.
As a result, they sought to answer the following with respect to Instagram:
- Who influences the youth on social media (Instagram in particular)? What is their theme? What kind of content do they create?
- Were there other learning-based creators within Karnataka? What kind of content is created by these other players in the same space?
The/Nudge discovered that the youth preferred Instagram reels by micro-content creators who created content in vernacular language (Kannada). They tended to engage with their content without even completely watching the entire reel. The youth connected with such content creators and trusted their endorsements, too!

Fun Fact:
When The/Nudge spoke to a few graduate students from their program during this research phase, they found out that these students had trusted The/Nudge’s course offering because it was endorsed by an influencer they followed and trusted.
Their actual competitors, The/Nudge realised, were not other educational channels but other entertainment channels because such channels were the ones that the youth naturally gravitated towards on Instagram.
So what could they do differently for the youth to feel motivated to consume informational content?
Understanding the youth’s preferences and the existing educational content on the internet made it clear to The/Nudge what they wanted to do differently: make learning fun and easy to consume using pop culture references, humour and other entertainment factors.
In short, combine education and entertainment.
For the education part, they mapped out the employability skills and topics on which they wanted to create content and what type of audience it was meant for. For example:
In parallel, for the entertainment part, they took inspiration from the micro-influencers that the youth of Karnataka followed to develop ideas they wanted to experiment with.
Then, they combined the two by using some of the trending reel templates on Instagram with information from the education part and put it out to test the audience’s reaction.
Earlier reels:
- Dancing
- Serious without humour
In a traditional learning program, the success metrics are usually defined as the learning outcomes and the program is designed to capture these metrics over the duration of the course. For this project, however, The/Nudge were constrained by the metrics that Instagram chose to show a business/creator account. So they approached defining and measuring success differently.
What The/Nudge set out to achieve: To make learning about employability skills fun and engaging so that users are motivated to consume such information
What Instagram showed them:
- Engagement metrics (Reel specific): Likes, Shares, Comments, Saves, Accounts Reached, Number of Views per reel
- Follower Metrics: Gender ratio, Times of day that their followers were active, Cities of the followers
- Community: Follower Growth (Follows, Unfollows), Total Accounts Reached
Which of these metrics would tell The/Nudge if their objectives were met or not and how:
Objective #1: Learning is Fun
- Relevant behaviour: Are users engaging with the content?
- Proxy metrics: Engagement metrics
Objective #2: More youth consume such content
- Relevant behaviour: Are users sharing the content with their circles? Are more users following the page?
- Proxy metrics: Follower metric

Arriving at a content strategy that tied all of this together

Given the popularity of reels at that time, The/Nudge prioritised creating content in the form of reels because of their reach and ability to engage a larger audience. This is how the process tied together:

During this initial “experiment” phase, The/Nudge rapidly experimented with different types of reels based on:

Topic theme - career related information, communication skills, etc
Format - role-play, dance-reels, etc

After categorising the data and analysing the engagement metrics (likes, shares, comments, saves divided by accounts reached) for each of the above, The/Nudge identified similarities and differences in the top 3 reels and bottom 3 reels. The pattern that emerged was:

All the top-performing content were relatable, bite-sized and had a learning element that was relevant to their life.

The/Nudge went from trending reel formats to relatable, bite-sized learning content -

Some micro-influencers from Karnataka The/Nudge partnered with which helped them increase their reach by 10-16k youth.

With the right content and reach formula, they were able to reach 120,000+ youth within a matter of one year!

Here’s how they did it.

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Implementation

Designing relatable, bite-sized, and relevant learning content

1. Relatable

All the content with the highest engagement was relatable in one or more of the following aspects:

They used pop culture references as a hook to grab the youth’s attention, to explain certain concepts and as background/filler music.
They used humour inspired by popular Kannada and Tamil movies (popular in the region of intervention) that made fun of the situation or characters.
They involved situations and characters that the youth faced/interacted with daily. E.g., nervousness in a job interview, banter with their mother, etc.
The content used a dialect local to the youth of the area - the way the content creators acted their parts were not foreign to the youth, and the way these characters spoke was similar to how they themselves speak. (Read: Kanglish - Kannada + English, Tanglish - Tamil + English)

Watch this reel to get a peek into how the different elements worked together:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Future Perfect by The/Nudge (@jobcoach_ka)

"Yes, I remembered that we should be careful about names in the emails we write. If you write an email 'fast-fast' you might address it to someone else. Thank you, sister. Super reel!"

(Source: Instagram comment by Gurudeviwalikar)

What did they learn?

Relatable situations can make the audience (youth in this case) feel validated about their experiences, tapping into their intrinsic motivation to consume the content.
The more relatable the reels, the better they performed on the success metrics (specifically ‘shares’).
Relatable elements like humour and situations are very region-specific. Humour, for example, varies in Karnataka compared to Tamil Nadu.

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2. Bite-sized

Another typical pattern in content with high user engagement was their length. The longer the content, the lower the engagement. Since Instagram is a very visual platform with distractions just a scroll away, The/Nudge had only 60 seconds (now 90 seconds) to get their message across. However, when content exceeded 40 seconds, user engagement dropped significantly.

Owing to this, The/Nudge had to contextualise and simplify the learning content in each reel heavily.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Future Perfect by The/Nudge (@jobcoach_tamil)

What did they learn?

When the content was within 30-40 seconds, it had a higher engagement and catered to the youth’s attention span. This often meant trimming the content from 5 takeaways to 3 to even 1.
A big constraint that comes with creating bite-sized content is not being able to cover all the information relevant to that particular topic. However, that pushed the team to prioritise delivering one piece of information with depth and simplicity.

Relatability and bite-sized got the youth’s attention. But then, what about actual learning? Where does that fit in?

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3. Relevant

During their data analysis, The/Nudge observed how just any learning content didn’t work. While characters they face in their daily life might make it relatable, the information needed to be presented in a manner relevant to their lives.

Consider these two examples below:

The first video provides viewers with actionable tips to reduce nervousness before an interview. The second video explains the meaning of compound sentences and how to use them when conversing with a friend.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Future Perfect by The/Nudge (@jobcoach_ka)

Both of them had relatable hooks in the beginning, and were under 45 seconds. However, the first video had a higher engagement.

Why?

The information in the first video directly applied to the lives of The/Nudge’s target audience who, based on their sharing in the comments, faced a tremendous lack of confidence, especially before interviews. The second video had information that was necessary from an English “grammar” point of view, however, it did not have a direct relevance to the user’s lives.

“Your videos help me practise English everyday and are very useful. Thank you, ma’am.”

(Source: Instagram comment from Hemanth)

What did they learn?

The more relevant the learning, the better it performed on success metrics (specifically “saves”). For learners to be motivated to consume and engage with the information presented to them, the information needs to tie back to their daily lives or pain points.

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4. Content is King, Distribution is God, but put them together and…

Sandwiching Content Calendar & Partnerships

The/Nudge collaborated with micro-influencers to increase their reach and developed purely entertaining reels in the context of employability.

Through this, they saw a surge in followers for 3 weeks since the said influencer partnership and an increase of 3-4% in engagement on their reels.

What did they learn?

The/Nudge collaborated with micro-influencers from the same regions who had 5-10x more followers than they did. These and other entertainment based content were carefully planned between learning based reels. The/Nudge termed this the “Content Sandwich” strategy.