Of the 9 million college graduates that pass out of college in India every day, only 15 per cent are able to make it into the white collar work force. Going by the trends in the last decade and the changing numbers in China and USA, this pattern will increase 3 times over the next 7 years. On the other hand, there is a global high-quality talent shortage starting with Software Engineering and Financial, Business Services. The technology sector is said to have a shortage of 4.3 Million Workers by 2030 and Financial, Business Services a shortage of 10.7 Million by the same year.
AttainU is an online educational platform that was created to scale this difference and to ensure that the country's demographic numbers convert into a dividend instead of a burden. Divyam Goel, CEO and Co-founder of the company speaks about why they decided to create one of the largest online education platforms. Excerpts:
What was the idea behind setting up this platform online?
Online is more scalable than offline. The biggest challenge in online platforms has been completion rate, this is something we have been able to solve through our high human touch model enabled by the platform. For our first batch we are getting a 90% completion rate. Our online centrally driven platform allows us to ensure easy access for everyone irrespective of their geographic location, consistent learning outcomes, since teaching staff is an interface between the centrally defined platform and the students, a faster scale to be able to benefit all students looking to learn and low capital expenses to make business sense.
How has the programme grown with regard to its methodology and connection to the industry?
Since the beginning, we have worked with the industry to make sure that our course is industry-aligned and are graduates would be work ready from day one. This starts right from counselling and enrollment where we ensure that the students understand what it means to be a software engineer and where we are able to identify the students who would be able to benefit most from this course in its current format. The curriculum and pedagogy is something which goes through continuous iterations to adjust the learning pace and making students work ready. The production quality projects ensure that AttainU graduates have already worked on stuff similar to what they will be doing on the job. The structured mock interviews provide the confidence boost required to showcase the skills learnt during interviews. We are working both directly with industry partners and tech recruitment platform to understand and fulfill their tech talent hiring requirements.
Could you walk us through the programme and the various stages involved in the process?
Our current track is a 30 weeks, full-time, Software Engineering track with a specialisation in full-stack web development. The first step is counselling + enrollment - This is where students are educated on a career in Software Development, from our perspective to ensure to only take in students who would be able to benefit from our courses in their current format. Thus ensuring time efficiency for all the parties involved. The second step is skill development - This is where students go through our industry aligned curriculum including 60 assignments, 100 coding challenges, 3 real world projects totalling up to 1200 hours per student. The third step is placements - This is where, from the industry perspective, we provide a time and cost efficient solution to hiring high quality talent and from student perspective we prepare them for interviews and connect them to industry partners thus setting them on a high career growth curve.
How is an online platform better than the ordinary engineering classroom?
The main challenges with engineering or college education are those of lack of counselling, non-scalable model, obsolete faculty and outdated curriculum. Majority of the college goers in our country are first generation students from their families. This, combined with lack of counselling results in students only realising the futility of college education upon graduation once they don’t get a job. The online platform is just a medium of delivery which enables easy access, data collection-intelligence and scale. The counselling, curriculum, pedagogy, platform intelligence and placements ensure that the challenges in the college education model are resolved in our vertically integrated model.
What are the most important values that a student should look out for from AttainU?
The most important end value from a student perspective is placement above a particular salary in a high growth career trajectory at the end. Working backwards placement is a byproduct of the hard skills and the professionally required soft skills delivered during the course and the career informed mind-set developed during counseling at the beginning of the course.
