Our placement levels are as high as 95-100%, says Nikhil Barshikar, founder & MD, Imarticus Learning

Why did you choose skill upgradation and corporate training space? Wasn't it already very crowded?

I have an investment banking and capital markets background and have spent a lot of time in New York. When I decided to set up my venture, I decided to focus on employability. I also wanted to focus on the sector I understand – finance and analytics. Over the last three-and-a-half years, we built online and offline B2C (business-to-consumer) business in these two sectors. People come to us for these courses to get a job, certification and to upgrade their skills. For B2B (business to business) segment, we work with pretty much all the investment banks, capital markets and retail banks. This is done outside India too. For B2C, we are in the process of setting up centres abroad. Around 70% of our business comes from B2C and the rest is from B2B. While there are many corporate training courses for information technology (IT) and other sectors, there is a huge vacuum in the finance and analytics space. We are trying to fill this gap. Finance is also a large part of our country's GDP.

What's been your growth trend?

For our B2C business, we started with 500 students in 2012, which has grown to 7,000 students today. This segment has a lot of volumes but it's not chunky. On the B2B side, there is decent volume, but again, we have to build it. India-based volume is limited but it is very chunky as contract finance and analytics space sizes are larger. It makes sense for us to build both businesses as they feed into each other.

How successful are you in improving the employability of a candidate through your course?

There are two types of courses we run. One is mandate-driven where our clients are closely involved in the whole process of training. They are part of the pre-assessment. In these cases, the placement levels are extremely high at 95-100%. This is because our corporate clients have already seen the students, the curriculum is mandated by them and even the trainers are certified by them. Our second model is retail, where we launch a course based on our understanding of the market and after consultations with corporates. Here, our employability is in the range of 70% to 80%.

We have been seeing a lot of jobless growth in India. Do you think this issue needs to be solved first before moving on to skilling the people?

Employability numbers keep falling. When I started, it was 15%. Recently, I read it's 10%. So instead of going up, it is going down. One side of the story is that whatever is coming out of the college is not getting employed because of the skill gap. Today, I am sitting with an open mandate (for hiring and training) from HDFC, Axis and others. Are there jobs? Absolutely, there are jobs but you do not find enough employees with skills to take up those jobs.

What are your expansion plans?

In the B2C segment, we will do a lot more geographical diversification. Right now, we are mostly in tier 1 cities. We want to go to tier 2 cities. We don't want to get lower than that. If we do, we will always to it in a satellite format. We are also looking to expand our product portfolio. In finance, we have 10-12 products and about eight in analytics. We need 20 courses in finance and 15 in analytics. In B2B, we already have some relationships in the Middle East and the Philippines. We will keep expanding that.