Reskilling essential to survival: Eevera Senthamilselvan, HyperVerge

Eevera Senthamilselvan, Talent Transformation Lead at HyperVerge talks about working with Tier 2, 3 colleges and creating opportunities for them. Senthamilselvan also talks about the importance of reskilling and how HyperVerge strategizes for the same.

Edited excerpts:

How are you handling the issue of talent transformation?

Ideally if we look at the recruitment pattern across the country, it targets tier 1 colleges which means the top 1000 companies in India recruit students from top 100 colleges.

First, we try to understand and study the colleges that we are recruiting. One important thing that we noticed is all top colleges have a lot of space for student leadership activities like clubs and chapters.  Students from tier 1 college are already part of clubs and have experience in organizing events which gives them a lot of exposure. The 80-20 rule of any job is communicating freely with an open mind and being extremely collaborative which is absent in tier 2 or tier 3 colleges. Through HyperVerge Academy, we are working with these tier 2 and tier 3 colleges to open up student clubs, create internship opportunities so that when they are in their final year they get all the basic knowledge and exposure needed to face the real world. It does take a lot of effort since we need people from the Engineering or Deep Learning team to volunteer and guide the students in the right direction.

We are also targeting NGOs. There is an NGO called Nav Gurukul that picks up students who dropped out of 9th or 10th grade. Here we are looking for alternative talent pipelines, drop-out students who are interested in coding. We are also partnering with CSRs. For instance, Polaris Trust sponsors the toppers (top 10 ranks) of each state for their higher education. We are aiming to increase the first generation graduates and proportion of women in the company. We have female tech mentors to mentor female students from the beginning.

2. What about the issue of skilling and reskilling? How do Emerging/Deep Tech skills fit into all of this

In order to train and transform a person, internally we should have clarity as a team and understand what we are working on, the skills we need, our end goal, the base level and  the curriculum.

For instance, if we consider the Engineering team, we have full stack developers to standardize the internal training program for full stack development. We have a training model.  At HyperVerge Academy, we try the model with different target audiences.

Usually the bootcamp program takes around 4 weeks for the interns that we select while the same program takes 6 months for someone who does not know coding. Same training programs might take different time for different target audiences. And this could be because of so many factors like lack of exposure to coding, no prior internship experience, lack of access to laptops, poor remote communications, etc. But at HyperVerge Academy, we understand the difference in time required for different target audiences and ensure they all reach the same endpoint at their own pace and meet the standards that are already set.

All the existing technologies get upgraded at a regular period of time. Hence, reskilling is extremely essential in order to survive in the industry. And this should happen at a regular interval of time to stay updated with the latest technologies. We have a strong Alumni community in place, so that if someone requires assistance with skilling or reskilling, we connect them with the mentors to help and guide them with the same.

3. How are you preparing passing out students for the future

We encourage independent learning among students which means being less dependent on the mentors. This is similar to how it works in the real world where the managers provide them with a problem statement, where they will have to work on that, talk to people and come up with a first draft which will be reviewed by the manager. And they will have to work further on that from the feedback that they received from the manager. So similar to that, the students at HyperVerge Academy are given assignments and tasks which they have to figure out how to do on their own with little guidance from the mentors.

We also focus on remote communication. The students are provided with exposure to the industry, placements opportunities and hackathons.

4. What kind of upgradation of skills are taking place that you have noticed in your changing online courses?

Remote communication is getting upskilled. Everyone is learning to work async: this includes posting doubts and clearing them instead of the traditional school-teaching method.

There’s a lot of emphasis on self-learning.

Full stack development is another skill that is getting upskilled right now.

Platforms like YouTube are a treasure chest of knowledge and anyone with the intent of learning something new inevitably ends up there at least once. The videos on such platforms are free most of the time and this increases the accessibility of the topics these students want to learn.

We see nowadays that online courses are mostly used for clearing doubts and answering questions. The actual learning happens elsewhere.

5. What are the new skills that online students are acquiring? How do you balance free courses and paid ones

We strongly believe that any form of learning is simple and can be done with anybody.

The internet is now accessible to everybody and anyone can learn what they want very easily.

The 80-20 of learning is the ability to search rapidly. You look for solutions quickly and ask doubts quickly.

These are the types of skills that we are trying to push. The ability to be self-sufficient and arrive at answers by yourselves is something that is at the forefront of our mission to strengthen students.

Mentors are the points of contact for these young learners and are there whenever an issue arises or the students need help. These mentors review whatever the students put forth and give constructive feedback. This helps students learn to work properly by themselves without someone holding their hand throughout the entire process.