Shveta Raina, Founder and CEO, Talerang spoke to The Daily Guardian. Talerang (www.talerang.com) is an education management company that is focused on providing career training to students and professionals.
Q. What made you launch this business?
A: India graduates close to 20mn students every year, and less than 10% of them are reportedly work-ready. Talerang is an EdTech company that started as an independent research project at Harvard Business School with the mission to bridge this work-readiness crisis.
While I was a Director at Teach For India in 2009-2011, I traveled to over 100 colleges and spoke to thousands of students across the country. I realized that there was a lot of fear in our graduates on how to approach their careers and follow their passion. This disconnect between their personal vision, their parents’ view on the world of work, and the outdated school and college curriculum, sowed the seeds for Talerang.
After this, I went to Harvard Business School for my MBA, and did an independent research project in 2012-2013 with Professor Das Narayan Das that culminated into this social business. I researched some of India’s largest problems, and the employability crisis stood out to me as one that was crippling our economy. We have close to 20 million students graduating each year, yet some reports showed that less than 10% are employable. It baffled me. Without a work-ready work-force, how can India’s companies grow?
In 2014, we launched Talerang’s first cohort and placed them post a rigorous training program at some of India’s leading companies such as Aditya Birla, Godrej and Mahindra for internships. Post their internships, close to 50% of them were given call-back offers. Today, they are at the IIMs, McKinsey, Bain, and many are CEOs themselves. We had gotten them ready for the jobs of the future.
Q. Business success so far?
A: Talerang graduates are consistently rated as 80%+ work-ready by the firms that hire them, and 99% of them get placed. Talerang participants rate the training with 99% satisfaction in their learning and enjoyment of the program.
By 2020, we grew to 400+ corporate partners, and Talerang’s training methodology integrated live training with Harvard cases, proprietary assessments, interaction with guest speakers, industry exposure, custom learning journeys, training on 21st century hard and soft skills, and personal mentoring for holistic professional development.
Despite a purely online methodology, students self-reported a 53% increase in their work readiness after Talerang programs, a 47% jump in their communication skills and a 45% jump in their problem-solving skills. Talerang participants rate the training with 99% satisfaction in their learning and enjoyment of the program. We were now delivering quality training, but at scale.
By 2022, Talerang has directly trained close to 500,000 students and reached 30million candidates through partnerships with colleges, corporates, the media and the United Nations Development Program. Talerang has won several awards including one from the Harvard New Venture Competition, been short-listed by Kalaari Capital’s K-Start and been part of Village Capital’s India cohort.
Talerang’s unique and high quality online model offers a variety of industry-recognised certificate programs, with access to internship and job opportunities at 400+ corporate partners including the Aditya Birla Group, Mahindra Group, Godrej Group, Teach For India, Avaana Capital, Z3 Capital, Technoserve, Think Through Consulting, Schindler Group and more. Talerang’s training methodology integrates live training with Harvard cases, proprietary assessments, interaction with guest speakers, industry exposure, custom learning journeys, training on 21st century hard and soft skills, and personal mentoring for holistic professional development.
The courses are completely online and attract students from all over the world. They are rated at 99% in terms of learning and enjoyment customer rating despite the transition from offline to online.
Q. How do you offer customized career training to students and professionals?
A: Talerang’s assessments are percentile based and personalized, that customize the learning to each student as per their career track and skill track. Each candidate gets a broad overview of the 26 21st century skills required to compete in the work world. Post this, they select 3 areas they want to focus on, be it coding, marketing or finance. They get rigorous training and projects in those areas and then an internship and job accordingly.
When we partner with companies such as banks, legal firms, manufacturing or E-commerce, we customize our content to their participants’ needs by curating the mix of skills, case studies and projects as required for their industries. IIT Bombay, Madras, Shiv Nadar University, Avendus, Deutsche Bank and 100+ colleges, 400+ corporates have partnered with us on their training and hiring needs. Recently, high-potential young professionals from Tvarit GBMH (German artificial intelligence company) completed our program and said: “The whole class was an amazing learning experience. We discussed things that the company would not normally deal with. Above all, I learned about professionalism.” Their satisfaction ratings were >90% and overall management skills and leadership growth was tremendous.
Q. What are your future plans?
A: Talerang aims to become India’s first Edtech Unicorn in employability. We are a social enterprise, bringing in an impact focus to each candidate and organization that we work with. We want to create a work-ready India. We want to reach 1 million candidates by 2030, and be a 1000 crore enterprise.