HYDERABAD: Naveen Samala and Venkata Sudhakar Nagandla, two IT professionals, are the hosts of ‘The Guiding Voice’ podcast series. They call it a lockdown product conceptualised to give back something to society. Naveen says: “It is a not-for-profit venture focused on shaping the careers of students and young professionals with a vision to reach one million people across the globe. We are seasoned IT professionals from Hyderabad and take pride in being passionate about sharing the knowledge with the younger generation.
Having studied in rural parts of India and completing our engineering from tier 2 colleges, it was not a smooth journey to reach our respective positions. We believe the journey could have been more enjoyable, if we had a mentor from the industry during the college days. Hence, we decided to share our knowledge with the younger generation.”
The seeds for the venture were sown before the pandemic. Sudhakar says: “Before the lockdown, we used to visit engineering colleges and business schools to guide and help students in pursuing corporate careers or launching their startups. After the lockdown was imposed in March 2020, we started doing the same virtually by conducting webinars and guest lectures using virtual meeting platforms like Zoom, Teams, WebExand Google Meet.
During the first week of April 2020, we launched the podcast series ‘The Guiding Voice’ with a tagline ‘For a Better Future’. As part of the series, during every episode, we interact with Industry experts oracademicians or coaches or young achievers across the globe to drive insightful conversations that will help the audience learn things and make informed decisions regarding their respective careers.”
Stating that the past year has been a learning period for them, Naveen adds: “We learnt new skills like audio editing, mixing, creating graphics and videos from scratch. Also, we identified podcast hosting platforms and fed our channel details to all podcast streaming platforms.” TGV is available on major social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest.