World Youth Skills Day: 5 upskilling startups creating employability for Young India

Covid-19 has posed an unprecedented challenge to the entire humankind. Surviving the pandemic and then finding means to live through it is a gargantuan task. The economic slump has forced hundreds of thousands of companies to close business rendering millions jobless. The young workforce is also grappling with the lack of job opportunities and retrenchments. But yes, there is hope. Slowly but steadily, we are moving towards recovery mode. With the economies looking to get back on its feet, the startup ecosystem is at the heart of this revival.

World Youth Skills Day is observed every year to recognise the importance of equipping young people with skills that can help them in becoming entrepreneurs, find employment which offers them decent work.The theme of World Youth Skills Day 2021 is celebrate the resilience and creativity of youth throughout the crisis with the theme: “Reimagining Youth Skills Post-Pandemic,”. The pandemic has accelerated the need to redefine existing job functions and related skill requirements. Hence, upskilling has become a necessity to prepare for the future. There are several Indian startups offering industry-oriented skills along with suitable job opportunity for youth.

Here is a list of five upskilling startups creating employability for India’s young workforce

BridgeLabz Solutions LLP:

One of the largest IP-driven incubation labs aimed at nurturing engineering talent, BridgeLabz engages in upskilling engineering students and graduates in India, thereby making them industry-ready while also providing them with strong placement support. BridgeLabz is making progress towards addressing the tech employability deficit globally by providing a job-ready workforce. The Mumbai-headqurtered company talent with extensive experiential learning of industry-relevant coding skills with projects and guidance from expert mentors. Founded in 2015 by Mr. Narayan Mahadevan, BridgeLabz aims to create a million jobs over the next 5 years.

GlobalSkill

Launched in 2019 by Rajan Gaonkar and Atul Shirwadkar, The Thane-based startup helps blue and grey collar employees, underprivileged job seekers, and students improve their skills. THe startup has four kinds of users: people doing skill education courses, people seeking jobs, employers posting about job requirements, and video course creators publishing content. The platform’s objective is to help one million underprivileged youth develop industry-oriented skills to find better employment opportunities.

Avodha

Avodha is a Kochi-based vernacular upskilling platform established in 2020. The edtech startup offers 17 courses in coding, mobile mechanics, marketing, accounting, and more in Tamil and Malayalam. The founder says that the startup has been named Avodha, which means skilled labour in Hebrew. The platform has a job portal that helps students find and connect with appropriate job opportunities upon completion of the course. The startup claims to have 20,000 paid users enrolled on the platform as of now; 7 percent of these are Indians living abroad.

DALHAM Learning

Founded in July 2020 by Shekhar Bhattacharjee, the Bengaluru-headquartered edtech startup takes a holistic approach towards education and offers social science and liberal arts courses for undergraduates and postgraduates of Engineering and Management disciplines. Through various programs offered at DALHAM Learning, it aims to provide opportunities to the students to explore a variety of academic areas from science to literature. The startup operates in a B2B model where the institutes subscribe to the courses and its students can simply log into the platform and start learning.The startup looks to bridge the employability and skill gap.

CareerLabs

Led by Byju’s former leadership, the Bengaluru based startup offers courses with industry insights and updated curriculum for students to develop industry required skills and also opportunities for placement in top companies. The edtech platform helps students studying in undergraduate courses identify the right path, upskill them, coach them through industry mentors, help them participate in hackathons/ workshops/ internships, provide the finishing touch through their finishing school and finally get into dream jobs It claims to be having over one lakh students, out of which 30,000 are active users on the platform and close to 3,000 have subscribed for its paid programmes.