Connecting students with job opportunities

Students generally attend lectures to get the theory right. But then there are some who will not just sit in but get down to doing things.

- Namita Shibad

PUNE:

Rakhi Pal wanted to get into IIT-Bombay, Delhi or Madras, but she got into Cummins College of Engineering in Pune. As a student, she took part in hackathons that companies organised for college kids, and it was after attending several such events that she discovered that huge gap, which led to the start of her own company, BeepHire, in 2020.

How it started Says Pal, "I observed that there was a huge gap in what we were being taught in our engineering colleges; it was a syllabus that was outdated compared to the technology that was being used in companies. And besides this hard skill, there were issues with soft skills, too. Students had no idea about communication, team building, etc."

And since this student was a doer, she got down to fixing the issue at hand.

She set up a syllabus that she thought would help students come up to speed with technology as well as soft skills. Audacious, you may say. But Pal did just that. "I met a lot of people during corporate events and, with their help, set up programs that these mentors would help guide our student community. We had short programmes on web and app development, AI, Machine learning (ML), Python and so on."

Were there any takers? "Oh yes," says Rakhi, "Initially, I was offering these courses for free. But then a mentor told me that people do not value free things. So, I started charging from ₹99 per course to ₹3,000-₹4,000 for an AI or ML course. I paid the 'teachers' ₹25,000 per month and had about eight different trainers. In the first month itself, I raised ₹27,000."

BeepMentor (the company started initially for providing courses) was generating revenues, and by the time she passed out college in 2019, she had reached break-even.