"Of the 70 million Indians who graduate every year, around 60 per cent of them are unemployable. Those are the people we want to help, especially graduates from Tier 2 and 3 cities, who do not have access to the upskilling opportunities available in metropolitans," says Arihant Jain, co-founder, SafeJob, an online learning and upskilling platform that is trying to address that problem.
SafeJob is an online initiative that Seekify and Safeducate launched in March 2020. Safeducate itself is a skilling and training organisation for government and private jobs, with SafeJob being its initiative for private jobs. Seekify acquired Safejob that claims to attract over 1,000 students every day to get trained and placed.
“I was working with SafeEducate, which ran training centers to help upskill recent graduates as well as those workers who were looking to improve their chances of gaining better employment. I got in touch with Arihant, who is the CEO of Seekify, in late-2019 to digitise our training capabilities and while we were figuring it all out, the pandemic struck,” recalls SafeJob CEO and founder Divya Jain, 37 (no relation).
And just like that, digital was king. Arihant, 38, who previously held gigs in the e-commerce and e-tail sectors, marvels at the growth of online learning within the last year. “E-commerce took about seven years to take off in India, roughly 2010-17. Edu-tech took off in a number of weeks and it’s growing by leaps and bounds every day,” he notes.
SafeJob has between two to three lakh registered users so far, of which 50,000 have been trained and 3,000-5,000 have been placed. The company also finished training 3,000 students and got jobs for over 2,000 by May to test and understand the placement process. “We have around 100 educators, who can be split into three groups: actual teachers who hold the live lectures and classes, usually in vernacular; industry experts who can tell learners the ins and outs of the trade they want to get into; and mentors who can act as a sounding board,” explains Arihant.
“We are heavily results-oriented, and our classes are a combination of live lessons and asynchronous lectures, which are designed to be engaging and gain the best possible outcomes. We do a pre-assessment and post-assessment of each learner to see what the students have gained and how our lessons can improve,” shares Divya.
Since its launch, the company has also trained a lakh and half kirana store owners on COVID-19 protocols, under the aegis of the Suraksha Store project — where they onboarded 1 million Kirana stores and trained/certified 100,000+ kirana owners in weeks. As for the kind of jobs that graduates are looking at, Divya says, “It runs the entire gamut of logistics and supply chain management to inside sales and CRM, the last of which is bigger than ever before. We are also looking at ‘future skills’ and will be introducing modules in manufacturing, automation and other tech-heavy skills in the coming weeks.”