CaerusPoint is an award-winning education-based video production company with corporate headquarters located in Orlando. Known for the Major Decision video series, CaerusPoint specializes in the production of career guidance educational videos. CaerusPoint's internal capabilities include production design and scriptwriting. Kobie Pieterse and Chris Botha are the founders of CaerusPoint, and are continually finding ways to reach out to students and people in the workforce looking to change or start new careers or deciding on their major. CaerusPoint provides critical information to jobseekers that helps them choose careers based on industry, lifestyle and a variety of other factors.
CaerusPoint has two target markets: high school and college students as well as people in the workforce looking to change their careers. In order to reach students, CaerusPoint decided to create a custom iPhoneTM and iPadTM app. CaerusPoint felt the prevalence of the iPad and iPhone in education and determined as an initial focus in that key demographic would help the company reach its target audience. CaerusPoint hoped to create an iPhone and iPad app leveraging the company's vast existing Major Dczion (pronounced Decision) video library. The company wanted to create an easy-to-use career guidance tool, advising students of the best career choices available. Additionally, CaerusPoint believes this app would have an impact in student dropout rates by sparking an interest in higher education and professional careers.
"We found that there was a distinct lack of career guidance in high schools and colleges and we hoped to fill this void with an app that would open conversations about specific careers, give students the guidance they would need to take and help them understand the lifestyle and key work related aspects associated with different careers," says Kobie Pieterse, CEO of CaerusPoint on the inspiration behind the Major Dczion mobile app.
CaerusPoint found a mobile application development partner in Amadeus Consulting after reading about many of our mobile success stories. The company felt that Amadeus Consulting's Mobile Team had proven value in the marketplace, and would be able to understand and exceed the company's technology needs.
As with many mobile applications, the Mobile Team works closely with the client to ensure that the company's branding guidelines are met and business goals are exceeded. For the Major Dczion app, the Mobile Team wanted to create an extension of the award-winning video series for CaerusPoint. The challenge for the Mobile Team was to create a scalable way for an enormous video library to exist within an iPhone and iPad application without sacrificing other app functionality.
The Major Dczion iPhone and iPad application is an entertaining and instructive way for students and careerists to make "Dczions" about jobs within certain industries. The Major Dczion app includes 11 major industries and multiple jobs within each of those industries. One of the major features of the app is the library of Major Dczion videos that students can access. The 22 minute videos feature two hosts in studio discussing the exciting and realities of featured careers as well as in field interviews with real people in their work environments. The videos are designed to give students an accurate portrayal of a typical day-in-the-life-of the featured career, as well as what to study for that career.
In addition to the library of videos, the Major Dczion App features a comprehensive animated ranking system that allows students to evaluate and grade the importance of key lifestyle factors such as work life balance; earnings potential; networking; social contribution among many others. This tool is designed to help students find careers based on the best fit with their expectations and preferences.
Amadeus Consulting's Mobile Team created the Major Dczion iPhone and iPad app for CaerusPoint using the Apple® SDK. The Creative Services Team created the app icon to be submitted to the App Store, as well as the intuitive application user interface. In order to house the many career videos, the Mobile Team created an XML schema for backend data storage, which allows a scalable amount of videos to be added to the application in the future. To ensure the quality and ease-of-use, the Mobile Team conducted extensive quality assurance testing on the application, a requirement of Apple's strict App Store policies.
CaerusPoint is hoping to make Major Dczion the household name for major career decisions and for it to be a vehicle to bring the show Major DecisionTM to students worldwide.. One of the first steps in this process is to take Major Dczion to the Android platform, to reach even wider audiences in the near future.
The Major Dczion App was successfully deployed to the Apple App Store in May of 2011.