Analytics
today is one of the leading areas for Professional Up-Skilling and Re-Skilling
in the country. Companies are increasingly demanding a Data Analytics-equipped skill
set in their professionals, in order to capitalize and make meaningful
conclusions about the huge quantum of data at their disposal. Jigsaw Academy is
one of the premier Online Analytics Education Company, functioning in the
Ed-Tech space today.
As
through our conversation with Ms. Geetika Goel, CTO at Jigsaw Academy,
we attempt to identify the key trends in the professional education ed-tech
space and how Jigsaw Academy differentiates itself from other Ed-Tech Players.
Q1. Jigsaw
Academy today is one of the leading providers of Analytics focused courses. How
has the company achieved scalability in the Indian market since its inception
in 2011?
At
Jigsaw Academy, we have focused on emerging tech right from the start,
Analytics being one of them. Our founders, who were Data Scientists themselves,
faced a severe demand skill gap in their professional career. Hence they
executed the idea, that it is crucial to train people on emerging technologies
to solve current and potential future skill gap. AI, ML & IoT are some
domains where this problem exists, where the skill potential is not sufficient
for organizations. We were an online school for a very long time. Towards
2015-16, players offering classroom coaching started entering this industry,
& people were drawn to their programs. While we realized our strength lied
in the online business, we figured there was at least a need for Blended mode
of learning. Blended programs did better for us, but the challenge was keeping
the price point down. Now with the Covid situation, our adaptability and
experience towards the online delivery of programs helped us to make a smooth
transition.
Q2. How
big a learner base does Jigsaw Academy have currently? Which target audience
segment is dominating its learner profile?
On
the Consumer level, at any given time we have close to 5,000 active learners.
Overall it would be around 40,000+ learners. We focus on Mid-Career
professionals as primarily they would be the ones working on end to end data
skills. We have done trainings for senior management as well, but those are
different kinds of programs. The larger programs that teach a student end to
end from programming to creating strategies around data are focussed on mid-level
professionals who looked for career transitions across jobs/industries.
Q3.
In a massively fragmented industry for re-skilling and up-skilling programs in
the country, how does Jigsaw Academy differentiate itself from players such as
upGrad, Simplilearn, Coursera, Udacity, Great Learning and others?
We have
a primary focus on courses that provide outcome-based learning. Students should
become production ready as soon as they join an organisation. Hence, students
are made to practice on Industry data sets, with live problems coming directly
from our industry partners. This gives our students an edge over other academic
programs. Our cybersecurity program offers guaranteed placement with HackerU, a
leading Israeli Cyber Agency. Learners majorly go for such programs for Career
Transitions and getting Placements, and hence we lay a major focus on that too.
Q4. Can you briefly explain the business model of the
company?
We do our research to identify what program and what
technology to offer to our audience. We then identify Subject Matter Experts
& corporates in the space who are leaders in the space, for gauging
industry relevance of content and creating industry assignments. Price point is
finalized keeping in mind the paying capacity of the end user and our delivery
and course creation cost. We have an in-house production team that creates
video content, animations, voiceover from SMEs or separately. We have in-house
faculty as well, and content creation could vary from video to video as well. University-partnered
programs come part handled by the university and some part handled by us apart
from some content actually co-developed.
Q5. Which
is the most traction gaining course segment for the company in terms of
learners?
Cybersecurity
we have released one batch about 6-7 months back, with batch experiencing good
traction. We also offered placement guarantee in the program. IoT is a space
actually being encouraged by NASSCOM and as of April 15th, there were 1,800
learners in our program. While we do have a good traction for AI & ML, it
is not as high as Analytics itself, which ultimately forms close to 50-60% of
our learners.
Q6. A
prominent bottleneck encountered by online skilling platforms is the low
completion rates of programs. How is the company endeavouring towards bucking
the trend of low course completion rate?
We
ensure that there are a lot of Practice assignments & focus on Example
Based learning. We are known for our content widely & it takes us generally
8-9 months to develop the course. Industry
relevance is included in form of Industry projects. To keep people engaged, we
keep putting up small contests, and have a dedicated student engagement team
for keeping in touch with the student’s progress across the course.
Q7.
What are the program delivery modes that the company offers to its learners?
We
focus on Blended delivery mode as of now. We have classrooms in our office,
where students come on weekends and attend classes. We have courses in tie-ups
such as with IIM Indore, where there are campus visits but a lot of teaching is
Live-Online. We also have self-paced videos that we advise students to go
through before they turn up for the live lectures. We try to make videos Byte
sized to capture larger engagement and attention.
Q8.
Which business segment is Jigsaw more focused on? How does the B2B (Corporate
Training) segment of the company compare with other segments?
Majority
is individual focused learning on the consumer side of our business. B2B has
picked up very well in last few years, and now we are at 60-40 ratio for B2C
& B2B segment. We recently got acquired by Manipal Global Education
Services (MAGE), and they focus on college education as a segment. We do receive
updates from Manipal about prospective colleges for the student programs, but
it is a bit early for me to comment on that.
Q9.
What future trends are you expecting to encounter in the vastly changing online
skilling industry?
People
are taking to online learning/skilling a lot now. With the Covid situation,
even schools are forced to embrace online learning at least partly. With
Manipal and Jigsaw coming together, we would be focusing on a CCC agenda- Curriculum, Career, Continuum. We want to ensure
that right from the Curriculum mode (College learning) of Students, we should
be able to assist them to Re-Skill or Up-Skill at any stage during their career.
We want to be able to assist students all throughout their Development cycle
and help them achieve a Continuum of learning. Our goal basically revolves
around solving the employability gap that exists today at academia level and re-skilling
requirement at professional level today and in future.
For feedback and
queries, reach out to the Ken Research
Team at ankur@kenresearch.com
To
Know More Information on the publication:-
Contact Us:-
Ken Research
Ankur Gupta, Head Marketing & Communications
+91-9015378249
