The job-linked learning programme will offer peer to peer learning, mentoring, and coaching, or what Screwvala calls mostly soft-skills that will prepare the workforce for being job ready.
“Today, I will say many people who are managers and leaders around the world, are not yet qualified for their jobs. They got their promotion just after two years and now they need to figure out how to behave like managers and leaders. It’s a controversial point of view, but this is where the importance of job-linked reskilling programme is,” said Screwvala, founder and chairman, upGrad.
He told ET that outside of current higher-education courses that the company is offering in collaboration with universities and institutions around the world, upGrad will focus heavily on the new job-linked skilling programme.
“The job-linked learning programme is really the next big thing that we are focusing on in education, where we want to double down and put in about Rs 400 crore,” Screwvala told ET. “In the next five years we see learning being disrupted… I am saying learning, because education will remain a calendar event, when you go to school, college, get a degree, throw your hat and freeze that frame. After that is when life starts. This is what is scheduled by your parents, by social pressures, by 100s of years of vintage. I am not talking about disrupting that, but after that is really where the disruption is happening.”
According to Screwvala, coaching and mentoring are going to play an incredible role across the world in that disruption. “To me, peer to peer learning is going to be the big thing to disrupt the next level of overall learning. I think less and less people are going to be enamoured with degrees and more and more about being job ready,” he said.
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The investments will be done via internal accruals. upGrad has recently raised $225 million at a pre-money valuation of $2 billion.
He added that the country needs to get a large population of 100 million people job ready. “Not 1 million or 2 million, but 100 million people need to be job-ready. And while everyone’s talking about skilling, for most people it is a lower parameter. But actually, being job ready is a very different process.”
Giving the example of the IT industry, which took it upon themselves to train their workforse and set up centres in Mysore and other places, he said that was for one sector only.
“It was because even in the year 2000, they realised that people were not job ready. Today, there are massive sectors – from food delivery to transportation to supply chain to logistics to BFSI. World is changing fast and people are not job ready,” Screwvala said.
The course, which upGrad will launch under its own brand, will cost between Rs 1-2 lakh and will be spread over 6-9 months. It will be an online course and can be done along with the job.
“We will have an average six-to-nine-month online program, which you can do while being in your current job. It’s not like you have to take time off, because nobody wants to take time off to go back to a classroom. But, when I say online, it is not a zoom call and live lectures, which is what it was during COVID. This is a very interactive, high touch learning process on a digital platform with peer-to-peer learning.”
The company’s investment will be across content, learning, mentoring, grading, and training. The programme will also aim to mobilise the largest trainer’s base as it grows.
The company is aiming to be profitable by the end of the first year in this division, so as to re-invest more for outcomes and job placements.
