Recently, NewsX was joined by Rohan Krishna, the CEO & Co-founder of Ed Santa Education in its special segment NewsX A-List. Taking about his platform Elite, Mr Krishna said, “Think of it as a buddy you can have all the time with you for your learning and skilling requirements. It is essentially a growth platform for enterprises, you meet everyone that enables on the job learning and skilling in bite-size format. The entire premise on which it works is that learning is not done just through courses. In fact, a lot of learning, effective learning happens when you try to find solutions to problems day to day at work. And this is done in various formats, either through videos, through articles, podcasts, webinars, events, conferences, influencer’s content and social content. And these contents stay with you and these learnings stay with you for your lifetime. And Elite just does that, bringing everything right away at your access. So think about it as a growth tool that aids individual empowerment by keeping them motivated, engaged and skilled.”
Mr Krishna shared an interesting reason for starting this platform, he said, “Elite is a product of excellent education, where we also have other products like ‘Get me a course’, ‘Get me employed, ‘Get me Guru’, & ‘adsmart.’ Now Elite has been formulated based on the data and learning from all these different products. And the best part is that it’s been built during COVID, introduced during COVID. And it’s now being used during COVID.”
Rohan added, “There are two sides of the problem. On the first side, we find the users like you, me, employees, team members and colleagues. Now what we did is we asked a basic question and the question was, tell us what do you want to be five years or seven years down the line? What are your aspirations? And you won’t believe 75% of people got stumped and the smaller pie who had the answer to it also fumbled when we asked them ‘how’. In today’s world, when everything is available on a click, let’s say if you have to go from point A to point B, or from Delhi to Mumbai, you know how to click to book your flight, your hotel, you can book insurance, your cab, everything. But when it comes to your career, you have a missing destination. And even if you know, you don’t know-how, this was one of the sides of the problem which is severe. On the other side, when it was the enterprise and it was even disheartening because based on our research and data, which is available out, there is no argument that entire globe is facing a serious skill gap. In fact, McKinsey and Company recently shared a report that 87% of companies globally are experiencing skill gap, or if not, it will fall in the next five years. So we decided that we will step one step ahead to find out why. Many senior officials did not know the skill level of their employees. And it was because of the lack of engagement, people have less time, people don’t get contextual, personalized content. And all these are aggravating into a bigger skill gap. So definitely, we saw that there is a bridge which is required to be built on both sides. And that’s why we introduced Elite, making learning a habit by bringing personalized and contextual content, whenever you need whatever you need and the way you need.”
Elite is a very simple and user-friendly product.”When we work with any enterprise, we try to understand what kind of requirements they have, what kind of job roles they have. And based on the job roles and the requirements for the skill mapping, we go and deploy it for a company. Now, it takes less than 30 seconds for a person to go and sign up. And once they are signed up, they have each and every employee or a team member has their personal advisor. Now, this skilling advisor takes care of everything, like what are the skills you need to work, what should be on top priority and not only that he also takes care of how can we bring the relevant content to you in your feed or in your learning habit. Now, think of it, there are multiple features in Elite which fits each and every persona, I’m just going to cover a few of the very important points, important features, like for example, we have something called a feed. Now feed is something like LinkedIn or Facebook. But this is no-nonsense. It’s a very focused, highly relevant content related to the skills you’re working on or there is a social element to it. Let’s say I am working on a project and I like to have a video which is related to a skill I can share with my friend, my colleagues, if I’m managing a team, I can create a list of content and share with different team members. That’s a new way of learning and skilling, which Elite brings in. There are multiple features, on Sunday, when you’re taking rest, and you’re getting ready for your next week, what it does is it plans out everything for you. And Monday when you are at work, it says that based on your upcoming meetings and the projects, these are the videos you can watch and even articles you can read, these are the podcasts you can hear. A thing about this is the new way of learning and skilling which Elite brings in,” said Mr Krishna.
Covid-19 pandemic has affected almost all the sectors. Addressing the pandemic, Mr Rohan said, “Even though COVID is not one of the best things to experience or to have, but yes, a few industries have seen a surge, ed-tech has seen it. But what we have been noticing is a mixed effect. Now mixed effect means, for example, MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses), they have a very low completion rate of 8-9%. Now without getting this problem solved, surge made these numbers look bad, worse. On the other side, when this entire episode was getting introduced in March, if I’m right, people had thought that now they’re gonna have time, no time will be spent in commuting, they can spend their time on learning and skilling. Unfortunately, it did not happen that way. Because now people are working extra hours, the project delivery times and short enough. So time was a constraint and now it’s become even worse. But we are glad to see 200% crosses because, for us, user engagement is a top priority. That is why we saw a very good output during this COVID time.”
Answering about how one can use the platform and describing the subscription model, Mr Rohan said, “It’s a very simple and affordable annual subscription plan which we have for Elite. The cost varies from enterprise to enterprise because we do not just work with MNCs, but also startups, MSMEs, midsize companies and that also across industries, from IT Software, IT product to healthcare, hospitality and various other industries. It’s a customizable product, based on the features enterprise wants for the employees and themselves, the cost gets defined, but yes, we can say that it has an excellent ROI in terms of elite usage.”
Talking about their future plans, Mr Krishna said, “In terms of the expansion plan at moment, we are just focusing on enterprises in India, Middle East and Asian countries. But yes, next year, we do have plans to expand our operations to the US, Canada and Spanish speaking countries. We have some big fat brands working with us using us, & every month we have new companies who come and say, Hey, here are my employees help us out in getting them engaged, let’s bring some smile on their faces in terms of learning and skilling. And we are happy to see that, we find personal notes from users or end-users where they thank us for such a feature on a product. We feel very satisfied and that gives us more power to go ahead every day and extend and go for a bigger reach.”
Talking further about Elite, Rohan Krishna said, “When we talk about new dimensions of learning and skilling, we do face roadblocks, we do experience people coming in still having the mindset of courses, and later they come back and they say that what we see through your lens is the future of learning and skilling. But think about this visually, if you are a salesperson, and if you have one of your life’s biggest negotiation tomorrow, and you get a two minutes videos to see 5 or 15 ways to do a negotiation, that’s what learning and skilling are supposed to be. Or if you are a product manager working in an MNC and you’re working in building a product, that one article which can help you in building that successful product, is the way the learning and skilling are supposed to happen and that’s what we are able to bring in. No more adjusting time, personalized content, making sense out of the ocean of knowledge.”