Managing Talent Lifecycle, The 24x7 Way In an exclusive interview with Rajlakshmi Saikia Bhimwal, Karthik K.S. (CEO, 24x7 Learning P. Ltd.) talks about empowering India by enabling the development of educated manpower in enterprises across the country |
 The organisation refers to its young recruits as ‘cubs’, the idea being that these “little ones will, in the coming years, learn, experience and grow into fierce aggressive lions, becoming the best in whatever they set out to do, AND displaying integrity.”“Don’t limit yourself,” is what Mary Kay Ash once said, referring to people who limit themselves only to what they ‘think’ they can do. She opined that one can go as far as one’s mind allows and it is this belief that adequately epitomises Mr. Karthik K.S.’s life. An engineer by profession, Mr. Karthik went to work for many typical IT companies in India after having pursued his interest for business management in Delhi. From PCL to HCL and then Microland, he was engaged in varied work related to computer designing and manufacturing in the beginnning of his career. At Microland, which at one time was one of the pioneers of certification training in India, Mr. Karthik was heading the Education division for the company. With a constant drive to discover new methods of doing things, Mr. Karthik’s brilliance translated into the formation of a revolutionary learning and development platform which has become the need of the hour today. In 2001, Mr. Karthik and his colleague, Mr. Anil Chhikara, started 24x7 Learning, the company which has today earned the unique distinction of implementing the largest number of virtual corporate universities in the country. 24x7 Learning is an offshoot of the many issues that IT companies faced with reference to imparting training to their employees. Back in the year 2000, companies needed to train their employees in IT, especially in cases where individuals working on a specific router needed to be trained on other specific routers or technologies. At that time, the only option available was to offer a standard training package (say for 8 days, at Rs. 50,000, including travel, accommodation and training costs). This was the only option available, even if the individual did not require all 8 days of training. Hence, there was a distinct gap between the kind of training that an individual needed and the kind that was on offer. Apart from this, training was anyway expensive wherein 80 per cent of the training costs only comprised of the amount due towards travel and stay. Therefore, the actual cost of the training sessions was only around 20 per cent. This feature brought out the huge gap that could easily be filled by using e-learning as a medium of training, in order to reach a large number of people across the world in the most cost effective manner. Therefore, Mr. Karthik confirms that 24x7 Learning, as an organisation, conducts training using technology as a medium to reach a large number of people across the world. The primary mode of delivery is the Internet, wherein the training delivered can be either synchronous or asynchronous. He adds that in such a system, a key factor is the faculty member who can then train millions of people sitting at one place. Hence, this training model makes 24x7 more renowned as the technology enablers of training. |
 Interestingly, Mr. Karthik’s theory and conviction behind starting such a company was not restricted to merely bridging the gap in training by using technology as an enabler. His organisation stands on a mission which is far-reaching and much beyond what just another company would seek to achieve. 24x7 Learning has a nationwide agenda which affirms that the company’s potential clients lie within the 350 million Indian youth. In his opinion, with a population touching 1.2 billion, India has 350 million people in the age group of 20 to 25 years, of which about 12 million enter the higher education stream every year. However, of this number, only 3.5 million finally graduate while around 6.5 million drop out - definitely a huge loss. Referring to the BRIC report which has foretold that India will become a superpower by 2050, Mr. Karthik says that this would primarily depend on the number of graduates passing out each year. Keeping this in mind, the increasing rate of dropouts is a big concern. Further, even out of the 3.5 million graduates, 10 per cent are engineers (of which only 25 per cent are employable graduates, while 75 per cent own a degree but are unemployable), leaving only a few lakh ‘employable’ people. In the backdrop of such statistics, 24x7 Learning firmly maintains that the country needs to pump in more employable graduates in order to surpass the 7 per cent growth rate. He believes that this is a national problem, since the solution of filling this huge gap between the supply of employable people with the present demand, needs revamping of entire structures which it is not easily possible. Therefore, as a technology enabler, 24x7 Learning strives to take learning and development to every corner of the country. Mr. Karthik says that India as a country presents a huge business opportunity and since their business model follows a social approach, they do not plan to work outside India. As a company, they believe that if employees do not receive training, they would become either unemployed or underemployed, and the 24x7 objective is to save such people from this social problem. Unlike most organisations, 24x7 Learning specifically mentions its company objective to be adequately aligned with its primary national objective. 24X7 Learning is a true proprietor of continuous learning, whether it is for the organisation as a whole or for its people. Keeping this focus in mind, Mr. Karthik shared the unique concept of Talent Lifecycle Management which is centred on harnessing talent through its multiple stages (from the moment one is recruited through every stage of advancement thereafter). Talent Lifecycle Management mainly acknowledges the fact that the kind of training required by employees differs according to the stage of the employees in their careers. For example, the kind and style of training given to a new recruit is most certainly very different from that given to someone at the CXO level, and also the speed at which one walks through his/her career span, to a great extent, depends on how such training delivery transition is managed for him/her. |
