Learning by doing is certainly not new. But there are companies who 'do' it differently. Crio.Do is one of them. But they realise that they are just one of the many players in the rat race. So to stand out they got a few things right at first. 'Why can't students learn the way we learn at work?' was the first thought founders Sridher Jeyachandran and Rathinamurthy R toyed with. So when developers, who the portal is focusing on at the moment, sign up for one for their course, they will hit the ground running and get started on the practical stuff. None of that 'First we teach you the theory which you can then apply'. It's projects from the word go.
Learn now, apply now
Rathinamurthy worked as one of Flipkart's earliest product managers. He resigned one year and two months after he became the Senior Director, Product Management. He started exploring other avenues and learnt that students need to pull up their socks and match what the industry requires, they will not be able to find jobs. Hence, Crio.Do was started in January 2018 to teach foundational and advanced concepts in software product development online. "Yes, there are a lot of videos out there that do the same, but through our work cloud environment, we create an environment that makes you feel at work and you, literally, learn by doing, just like any internship or work environment," says the entrepreneur. Crio Launch (started just four months ago) is for those students developers who want to get to know the field before they kick start their careers, Crio Accelerate is for working professionals looking to sharpen their skills and then there is Crio.DevSprint, open to all developers.
What you can expect
Now if you want to learn back end development, you will be given a front end app, say a variation of a delivery app. Then a problem statement is presented, like not just building it from scratch but also other tasks. If you want to be a performance engineer, you will be given problem statements that urge you to ensure that the app doesn't crash during sales that bring on high-traffic to the portal. These are called micro experiences, especially curated to create a work-like environment. "This gives them contextual clarity and acts like a psychological leverage that urges you to work on the problem," says the alumnus of SP Jain Institute of Management and Research. They will stimulate the whole virtual experience in such a structured way that it would be like you have taken an avatar of the product developer in the company. You will have a mentor by your side who will lend a helping hand when need be. Thus, every experience is crafted and personalised.
"Our whole outcome is not that they should be able to recollect, it's that they should be able to reply," explains Rathinamurthy. The point also is that those who have completed a course with them should be lifelong followers of learning by doing, even while at their job.
For more on them, check out crio.do
