Teach For Uganda – DHL Partnership Brings Career Mentorship to Over 800 Learners
Young people are often asked, “What do you want to become?” long before they have been given a meaningful opportunity to understand the choices before them.
Ambition is not always what is missing. Sometimes, it is exposure.
A learner can work hard in school yet have few opportunities to sit with professionals, hear how careers are built or understand how the habits developed in the classroom shape life beyond it. For more than 800 learners at Kojja Secondary School, a Teach For Uganda partner school in Mukono District, that conversation began with mentors from DHL.
Joseph Kawagga from Teach For Uganda engages learners during the career guidance and mentorship session, encouraging the learners to ask questions., think about their futures and explore the possibilities beyond school.
The career guidance session centred on one deceptively simple question: What comes after school?
“For many of these learners, this was the first time an adult outside their school sat with them and talked honestly about what a career actually looks like,” said Joseph, Program Coordinator at Teach For Uganda. “That kind of conversation can change how a young person sees their own future.”
The mentors did not begin with job titles. They began with the qualities upon which careers are built: discipline, communication, critical thinking and listening.
On discipline, the message was clear: talent may get someone noticed, but discipline is what keeps them in the room. Learners practised expressing themselves clearly and confidently, with some speaking before a group for the first time. They were encouraged to question, reason and look beyond the first available answer. They also explored how listening, a skill often underestimated, shapes leadership, teamwork and relationships.
In small groups, DHL and Teach For Uganda staff shared their own career journeys and responded to learners’ questions. The value of these conversations was not simply in telling young people to dream big. It was in helping them understand what those dreams may demand: preparation, courage, consistency and the willingness to keep learning.
For learners who may not regularly interact with working professionals, access to a mentor can help make an otherwise distant future feel more concrete. It gives them someone to ask, How did you begin? What did you study? What challenges did you face? What should I start doing now?
Learners at Kojja Secondary School take part in a career guidance and mentorship session
One career session cannot remove every barrier standing between a young person and their future. It cannot make the difficult choices on their behalf. But it can replace distance with access, uncertainty with better questions and ambition with a clearer starting point.
That is the gap Teach For Uganda and DHL are working together to narrow.
The Kojja Secondary School session forms part of an ongoing partnership to extend career guidance and mentorship to learners across Teach For Uganda partner schools. Similar sessions are planned at other schools in the coming weeks.
For more than 800 learners at Kojja Secondary School, the question “What comes after school?” may not yet have one definite answer. But it is no longer a question they must explore without guidance.
