empowerEd

empowerEd helps young Indian college students be Industry ready by the time they graduate. To do so, empowerEd creates pedagogically informed learning solutions that help students in improve their communication and reasoning skills and provides them access to mentors who they can relate with and are successful working professionals.

9 million students graduate from India every year; and the sector is expanding at the rate of 15% every year. About 40 - 90% of these students are unemployable depending on their domains and about 47% are unemployable in any domain. Employers are willing to train for the domain specific skills, but require a certain level of learnability in their employees that they test through communication and reasoning skills. Additionally, both students and employers constantly report a disconnect between what is taught in colleges and what the industry needs.

What if students are supported, in the best possible way to solve for exactly these skills while they are still in college so that they are industry ready by the time they graduate? What if a mentor that they can respect and relate to, guides them throughout their time in college on how to best use their time and exposes them to experiences and possibilities that they would otherwise be oblivion to. What if they explore different career paths and the skill sets needed for that by talking to people working in the field, who are trained on how to provide best guidance? What if students are equipped with the 21st century skills such as communication and reasoning skills and critical and problem solving skills, so that not only can they clear the job interviews, but can also apply these skills if they want to go for higher education or do something of their own.

empowerEd focuses on exactly these things by bringing pedagogy, technology and management together in the most human-centric manner possible. Our mantra: Empower students with the right 21st century skills and give them the right guidance so that they are equipped to find the right first job and beyond.  

Indian Higher Education has undergone tremendous massification in the last 15 years. However, this increased access is accompanied by poor quality, leading to tremendous unemployability rates amongst young graduates. FICCI reported in 2016 that 93% of the MBAs and 80% of the engineering graduates in India are unemployable. The problem is caused by various complex factors such as lack of good infrastructure and faculty; outdated curriculums, underprepared students, etc. The unemployability of these graduates causes several socio-economical problems, both for the individual as well as for the society. This is the problem empowerEd is trying to solve.

We work at college level because this is where the problem is most severely felt, the learner most motivated to learn and most receptive to online learning. While there is some good work happening in school education, hardly any innovations are happening at Higher Education level in India. When the end user is the customer, several issues facing online learning because of the stakeholder management can be handled better.

We decided on focusing on communication skills, reasoning skills and mentorships because of the insights we got through out research with more than 500 students, 18 colleges and 12 employers.

The primary beneficiaries of my solution would be college students from tier 2 and tier 3 cities and towns and secondary beneficiaries would be employers. The solution will help students improve their employability by showing direct and measured improvements in the following 21st century skills:

1. Communication Skills

2. Critical thinking and reasoning skills

3. Industry awareness and learnability

Since the content for communication and reasoning skills and critical thinking is very conducive to it, our program is also designed to improve the following skills, albeit indirectly:

1. Civic literacy and citizenship

2. Initiative taking and leadership skills

3. Social responsibility and ethics

4. Problem solving skills

1) By tracking the quality of their work, such as public speaking videos, writing quality, etc. over the period of their engagement with our program.

2) A controlled group study of empowerEd students vs. those who did not engage with empowerEd. - College students improve their communications skills

1) Tracking their progress through analytics on the online learning platform designed to help students acquire these skills

2) A controlled group study - Critical Thinking and Reasoning skills

1) Self reporting on usefulness of f the mentorships and clarity on possible career paths

2) Long term engagement with the mentors

3) Employer's surveys - Industry awareness and learnability through one on one mentorships and other useful material

Adaptive learning has been a buzzword in educational technology and why not: if done right, it can solve several problems facing education. However, when these adaptive learning solutions, force the learner to engage with the content the adaptive algorithm has chosen for them as opposed to giving them the choice to do so, it ignores several pedagogical and engagement principles. Our solution is unique because it draws from a deep understanding of pedagogical principles such as constructionism, growth mindset, motivation and engagement theories etc. and uses technology as a facilitator of these principles as opposed to purely chasing buzzwords only.

The idea of empowerEd germinated in my heart when I saw that several peers from my undergrad, especially those coming from vernacular medium schools, were unable to secure jobs because of their lack of communication and reasoning skills. The education system did not prepare them for the same, but employers tested them on these skills as a part of their interview process. Since the pain point was observed first hand, and the beneficiaries were people that I care about, the approach at empowerEd has been designed keeping them in the centre and through constant consultation with them.

Three major legs of our solution:

1) Communication skills: will be deployed in a blended learning format since in person workshops can be really effective in helping students lose their inhibition and online submission of their artefacts such as speaking and writing samples can provide feedback from facilitators and peers.

2) Critical and Reasoning skills: will be deployed through a pedagogically engaging and effective online learning platform that the learners can access on the go as well.

3) Mentorships: will be deployed as a virtual video conferencing solution that can extend to in person meetings, if logistics permit.

Before starting empowerEd, I had saved ~$30,000 to use as seed fund for empowerEd. So for the research and pilot phase, I have capital to sustain a team of 3 well skilled professionals in India for a year or so. We are about 3 months in already, so we still have a runway of 9 months in which we are on track to pilot all three legs of our core offering and start to generate revenue, if not profits. As a philosophy, our team believes in lean principles, iterating fast and running experiments to test all our hypothesis. We are frugal and our team’s collective skillsets coupled with the already available seed fund, is enough to keep us going for research and pilot phases. Before our runway ends, we hope to have a clear proof concept, which we will use to raise funds for the next phases.

The right distribution channel: Both B2B and B2C have their pros and cons. B2B could provide quick scalability, but changes the primary stakeholder, which could dilute the product quality a bit. Also, cracking B2B in India could require going through several hoops of organisational dynamics which we are not yet equipped to deal with. On the other hand, B2C definitely brings more engagement from the user and is conducive to a better product creation but could be expensive to scale.

Maybe showing efficacy through B2C and then going after B2G, could work, but we will have to experiment to see.

https://www.facebook.com/EmpowerEdLearningSolutions

http://www.aspiringminds.com/sites/default/files/National%20Employability%20Report%20-%20Engineers%20Annual%20Report%202016.pdf

Primarily, empowerEd is seeking to become a solver for the following:

1) Get feedback on our idea and approach from industry experts

2) Mentorships on different business functions such as marketing, BD and sales; product design, scalability challenges; contextualisation of the solution to apply in different contexts and geographies.

3) Visibility of the solution and partnerships for scaling.

Some of the minds that I most revere in education are from MIT, e.g. Seymour Papert and Mitch Resnick. It would be an honour to be associated with MIT Solve, as I try to solve a problem that I deeply care.

Pilot Partners: 

Several Colleges in Gujarat e.g. Indus Institute of Technology, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Institute of Technology etc, IIIT Vadodara etc. 

Marketing Partners: Yellow Media Labs

1) Pariksha.co

2) May be - Aspiring Minds

3) May be - LinkedIn