For the blue-collared professional

Targeting a largely unexplored sector of skill development training centres for hard skills like welding, bar bending, carpentry and so on, Laurus Edutech is a fairly recent company that has managed to penetrate the national market. Started in 2008, the company was put together by Anurag Jain, the founder chairman. Comprising of colleagues and friends from his previous occupation, Anurag and his team decided to to scrounge the field of hard skill development as per the requirements of the industry, making job opportunities easier to come by.Explaining Srinivas Rao Chedeella, the managing director of Laurus Edutech, says, “Our’s is a country that is not very industrially linked. Students learn about cathode ray tubes and so on while the TV generation has moved on LCDs and plasma technology. There is a certain gap between what is being delivered and what is needed. So we decided to go down the path less trodden and set up hard skill development training centres that would help bridge that gap.”After its inception and going operational around mid-2009, Laurus Edutech (LE) has churned out about 15000 students from its 80-odd centres around the country, including Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, among others. The Chennai-based company has an extra edge over its competition; “Being from a technological background, we’ve been able to create a portal that brings the trainees and employers together,” reveals Chedeella.The company recently signed an MoU with DLF and Tata motors, and the government initiative - Employment Guarantee Marketing Mission that will provide 1700 specifically trained students. He explains, “The MoU gives an understanding of the market demands. Our curriculum will be tailored accordingly and the students are bound to get jobs.”While the skill development may seem more of a sure-shot for a job than doing a general engineering, Chedeella observed that biggest problem they face is student mobility. “Students are not very keen when it comes to shifting bases. So more often than not, when they have more than one job offer, the preference is usually for jobs that are close to home, unless the company’s compensatory margin is wide.”LE offers three kinds of programmes: SCVT — state certified vocational training for a year, NCVT - national certified vocational training for two years and short one month to three months vocational training. Looking at the future of the industry in India, he opined, “Every year four million hard skills graduates are produced while the demand is for 13 million. And India can’t even import these skills because globally the generation is growing old; we’re probably the youngest working generation. But more importantly, we will be running out of trainers. We may soon have to set up centres to train the trainers. At the end of the day, we are for the blue collared workforce while an engineering degree is for the white collared.”Laurus Edutech currently has three centres in the city: Ameerpet, Patancheru and GD Metla industrial area.