Everybody is aware of the fact that the employability scenario of the youth in India is on a downward slope and not much is being done about this situation
Outdated curricula in academic institutions and lack of exposure to the practical world results in unemployment and students dropping out of college. To address this social issue, Amit Bhatia decided to tackle the problem at the root level itself. His training in the Aspen leadership program in the US helped him to look at the problem from a different angle. He decided to strengthen a person’s chances of employment by training him right from the school and college level, and in 2007, Aspire was born.
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| Course name: ProHite Duration: 2 yrs Price: Rs2250/semester Course name: ITPro Duration:4 yrs Price: Rs6250/semester Course name: MBAPro Duration: 2 yrs Price: Rs12500/semester Course name: CS-STEM Duration: 7 yrs Price: Rs4250/student |
“We called our business an embedded employability education. It means we go to schools, colleges and universities around the country, especially in tier 2, 3, 4 cities, and look for educators who can embed our curriculum into their timetable,” says Amit. “We go to them and tell them that we guarantee you that your students will come out more employable. That’s our value proposition,” he adds. Aspire did not want students to volunteer and leave room for slacking; we wanted to get the course embedded in the school’s curricula to help students.
Since 2007, Aspire has come up with four products to meet the needs of students at different levels — ProHire, ITPro, MBAPro, and CS-STEM. Out of these, ProHire has been actively adopted in various schools across the county. This flagship program trains the students in personality development along with other skills like communication, aptitude, problem solving, industry, and soft skills — all of which are required by employers at an entry level. “These are not the kind of things you will find in a B.com, B.tech, or BA curricula,” explains Amit. The program is conducted for 2 years and the time is divided at 4 hours a week. One of the certifications come from the University of Cambridge in UK.
Looking at the success of ProHire, which had 33,555 students last year, Aspire decided to focus on industry specific sectors. It introduced ITPro for engineers and MBAPro for management students — the most commonly pursued courses in the country. Since Aspire wanted to cater to students from tier 2, 3 and 4 cities, they wanted to do so at an affordable format. Through agreements with Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in the US, which is a leading computer science university, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), they developed tie-ups with iCarnegie, a subsidiary of (CMU), and were successful in this venture. This tie-up also helped students get iCarnegie certificates that allow them to access the world’s best learning management systems. Similarly, MBAPro brought to its students a wide array of study material through Harvard Business Publishing (HBP), a subsidiary of Harvard Business School. HBP has a learning management system that is used at Harvard to educate its students about case studies. It includes workshops in every semester. “Harvard is famous for case studies. Unfortunately, there is a finite talent pool in our country that is authorized to conduct case workshops. We bring Harvard accredited professors to the campus to carry out these case workshops,” says Amit. Through these industry-centric courses, they hope to train and expose the students early on so that the chances of employment increase.
To make learning fun, Aspire introduced the CS-STEM program (robotics-based science, technology, engineering, and math) for grade 3-10 students. The object of it is to make learning fun through the use of robotics. “They learn concepts of speed, proportionality, algebra, etc., using robotics. Experiential learning is what will help students look at things differently as they grow up,” explains Amit.
Aspire is headquartered in Gurgaon and has its employees working out of home from various cities like Siliguri, Ujjain, Bhubaneswar, Jalandhar, Indore, etc. It has spread its wings across 45 institutions in 12 states. Aspire has its own set of trainers for the ProHire course who go to colleges and give one month of training to students before they are deployed. They have more than 100 trainers who offer this course on a semester basis. Most of the colleges in India have a two-semester system that runs for 12 weeks. So they conduct classes 4 hours a week depending on the college timetable. “Our trainers become extended faculty members for the university. On an average we have 500 students on board from each campus,” says Amit. Every month, around 15-20 trainees become a part of Aspire.
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| Reach • Faridabad, Haryana - Manav Rachna International University - Engineering as well as MBA students opt for ProHire. Engineering students set to apply for the ITPro course from the new academic year starting July. All 6 schools under the university are ready to apply for CS-STEM. As of now, staff training is going on. • Rajouri, Jammu and Kashmir - Baba Ghulal Shah Badshah University - State has mandated all 1500 students to take up the ProHire course. • Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir - Islamic University – managed to reach out to students in terrorist-infested area. • Shillong, Meghalaya – North Eastern Hill University – It is a central university from the region where students from all 7 states in the North East study. • South – Nehru Group of Institutions – ProHire is catching up fast. |
For other courses, however, they took a different approach. “We don’t want people to say that educational institutions are now outsourcing their faculty and curricula. So we get professors from CMU who come and train the teachers of that campus,” says Amit. In addition, both teachers and students have access to the learning management system that provides them with student notes, faculty notes, study material, exercises, videos, and other aids.
“There were multiple challenges that we faced when walking down this road. The people who funded this company knew that it will take a long time to attain stability and break even. Besides we had to price the courses to make it affordable for mass adoption,” explains Amit. Another thing that he says is crucial is gathering patient capital.“There is a big difference between regular commercial entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship. You address social issues where customers are not as advantaged. You deal with people from BPL, rural, semi-urban sectors. Raising capital is an issue while convincing people about value proposition,” he adds.
Aspire also depends heavily upon the ecosystem and hence faced trouble when the recession kicked in. Amit also says that managing a network of missionaries is a crucial task for this kind of business. “People who agree to work with us without corporate benefits are difficult to find and gather,” he says.
As of now Aspire has managed to secure more than 50,000 students since the 3.5 years of its inception. In the next few months, it hopes to approach more schools and colleges for other courses and overcoming the most obvious challenge of “academic arrogance.” “With higher educational systems, you will have academics and the like who will look at the course and judge it as something that is not necessary. We are going to have to work very hard to convince them,” says Amit. As for their long term goal, Aspire hopes to get a billion students under its wings in the next 9 years.
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