The Chennai-headquartered global startup is upskilling Mechanical, Electrical Engineers around the world during this Covid19 period; claims 6X growth in its traffic specially from US, Europe and Asia.
Skill-Lync announces the launch of a special masters course in Electric Vehicle Design and simulation. The startup provides job leading courses for Mechanical, Electrical and Civil Engineering students in India and across the world. This special course is the first such curriculum in India which focuses on EV. With colleges shut and students looking to make the most of the time that they are at home the startup has fast tracked the development of this program and releasing it amid Covid-19. The cost of the special course would be Rs. 2,75,000 and has two types of duration for students thinking of opting for a full time or part-time option.
Officially founded in April 2018 by Sarangarajan V (CTO) and Suryanarayanan P (CEO), both had their first hand impact due to the lack of quality and application based learning in the Indian undergraduate education system. Skill-Lync was earlier started out as a YouTube channel to share engineering tips, but today it is an online training course for mechanical engineering candidates. It operates three different types of courses, ranging from one-off modules to full-time curriculums. The startup is backed by global investors including Better Capital’s Vaibhav Domkundwar, Y Combinator and Founder of Gmail & YC Partner Paul Buccheit.
Understanding that there is a significant skill gap similar to Mechanical Engineering in other nonsoftware engineering domains, the company’s focus is to help non-software engineers accelerate their career. This is important, because in India more than 70% of engineers are non-software engineers. This represents 5.6 million new engineers who are currently pursuing their engineering degree. Skill-Lync’s content generation engine, technical support engine and student success engine is setup to address the needs of non-software engineering students accelerate their careers.
Amidst Covid, Skill-Lync’s YouTube channel, which contains free technical webinars and explanations on short technical concepts, saw 6-fold growth in viewership as compared to last month. The interesting thing is not only did they see traffic coming in from India, but had users signing up for the course from US, Europe and Asia. US contributed to more than 10% of their website traffic. 85% of this total traffic is coming from Asia, 10% from Americas and 4% from Europe. A vast number of students are applying from countries like Pakistan, UAE, South Korea, Saudi, Singapore, Japan & China for the courses.
In Americas, 92% of the students came from US, the remaining majorly from Canada, Brazil & Mexico. Students from US have been Skill-Lync’s second highest demography of premium subscribers followed by Europe.
“As a whole the automotive industry is shifting to developing Electric or hybrid electric vehicles. But there is no educational institution in India or across the world that is focussed on teaching the technical aspects specific to these domains. Students are the ones who get affected by this gap. So we decided to get in touch with some of the best industry experts and develop a course that will aid Electrical & Electronics engineers with skills that will help them get equipped for the EV future,” said Surya P, Co-founder & CEO, Skill-Lync.
Talking about the current situation, Surya added: “Covid19 has had a significant impact on industries, there have been lay offs and looks like it will continue for another quarter. We at Skill-Lync believe that these industries will bounce back by Q3, Q4 of this financial year, at that time companies will exhibit a strategy of hiring trained candidates. This is why we have fast tracked this program, starting to learn this program during this lockdown period will allow students to get prepared for the post lockdown era.”
Interestingly, there is no other platform in the world that focusses on teaching in-depth technical skills to nonsoftware engineering students. Skill-Lync does that by developing coursework in partnership with industry experts, the courses not only have videos, every student ends up working on projects with the aid of industry-oriented software tools such as ANSYS, MathWorks, Converge, GT-Suite and many more.
Not just the uniqueness of the courses that Skill-Lync provides, the on-demand courses combined with online-live-support model has allowed Skill-Lync to achieve 77% course completion rate. The completion rate gets even more impressive when you hear that their student NPS is at 64.
