With more than 17,000 unique student users and associations with 50 plus colleges, CodeQuotient is bridging the gap between formal education and the IT job market in India. We sat down with, Arun Goyat, Founder & CEO, CodeQuotient, and discussed tech careers, college education, project-based learning, and a lot more.
For starters, Arun believes this is just the beginning of their success. As the tech job market evolves, the need for skilled and competent employees also grows. Unfortunately, a formal college education often fails to address this gap. Initiatives like CodeQuotient play a key role in resolving this imbalance of market-ready skills in the formal curriculum.
The CodeQuotient model is simple yet effective: They partner with the country's top tech companies and colleges. Then they train the students enrolled via the partner colleges and make them capable of a role in the partner companies. Moreover, the students pay zero fees or a nominal amount while receiving best-in-class education.
Here’s what Arun has to say about CodeQuotient and its vision.
1. Please elaborate about CodeQuotient, the problems you are trying to solve, and the services that your platform is offering
CodeQuotient is a learning and career platform for aspiring programmers that empower learners, colleges, and companies with pathbreaking programs and boosts conventional colleges to become powerhouses of talent. We are working with the students who are already in computer science streams and helping widen this pool by attracting students from other streams by offering company-sponsored programs.
Problems professionals face in India
Problems that Indian learners face begin from their educational institutions and screeches to the job market:
Problems on the colleges' side
The curriculum and the college are not totally in sync with the industry's needs. Even with more graduates, the good and reliable talent pool is much smaller.
The traditional education system is not enough to prepare students for fast-growing companies where technologies are rapidly evolving:
By graduation, learning capacity & opportunity in a college classroom goes down by 50%, resulting in lower problem-solving attitude and poor placements.
Problems on the companies’ side
Companies, on the other hand, work tirelessly to find & retain high-quality tech talent but are primarily unsuccessful:
Some companies are even trying to solve this problem themselves. Shopify's Dev Degree program and Zoho's Zoho Schools train inexperienced learners and incorporate them into the workforce.
2. How CodeQuotient is bridging the campus-to-industry skills gap?
CodeQuotient is solving this problem by working simultaneously with colleges and companies to create high performing developers:
CodeQuotient Academy is an innovative education model that transforms conventional colleges to become steady suppliers of skilled learners.
Colleges partner with us in either of the two ways:
CodeQuotient also intends to launch micro-course programs to upskill students in role/job-specific functions: a 45-day React.js course, a micro-course on WordPress development, a 30-day course for DevOps, etc.
Students will be selected for these micro-courses after a thorough evaluation of their skillsets, aptitude and mapping them to jobs and roles available in the industry. It ensures that we only enroll those students who can keep up with the pace of CodeQuotient.
These micro upskilling programs will make students not just job-ready but a step further—role-ready!
Benefits to colleges:
Companies work with us to tap into the pool of our SuperCoders and strategise their long-term hiring needs. As their talent acquisition partners, we ensure that there is no shortage of talent:
3. Please highlight the programmes/courses offered by CodeQuotient? How do you connect the students with hiring partners?
SuperCoders is CodeQuotient’s flagship program that trains students in Full-stack development (at no cost) and helps them get placed with product-based companies.
Grads of the previous cohorts are already placed with companies like Capillary Technologies, Farmart, Ensemble Health Partners, Value Research, and many more.
Students work directly with their mentors, which places them in an excellent position to make informed recommendations about the students to the hiring partners. In addition, their live profiles showcase verified projects (app demos and code), executable directly on our platform by the hiring partners.
4. How is your platform different from your competitors?
A high-tech platform empowers CodeQuotient’s programs, which enable project-based learning, real-time mentoring from industry experts, community-based sessions, and deep analytics of the students' performance. These features work together to match the suitable candidates with the right companies.
Moreover, real-life projects are an integral part of our programs. Students spend most of their time building projects and exploring problems and challenges based on real-world scenarios.
5. How do you train and prepare students to become high-performing developers?
We, at CodeQuotient, aim to give students first-hand experience of working in real-life, high-stress corporate environments. In this way, not only do they become ready for their roles, but also ready for career advancement. Apart from that, we are always ready to welcome questions and doubts. All of our instructors are readily available for students whenever they have any doubts.
6. What are your current growth and expansion plans?
CodeQuotient is constantly growing with 500+ top placements, 50+ Universities/colleges partners, and 40+ hiring partners.
We plan to open more CodeQuotient Academies shortly in partner institutions. Apart from that, we are already in the process of bringing more colleges and companies on board.
7. Anything else you would like to highlight?
The IT market is exploding, and we are just witnessing the beginning. At this juncture, both our country and the world need skilled IT professionals. At CodeQuotient, we ensure that the learners add value to whichever project/company they are working on.
We try to bring about a cultural shift in the existing education and training models. With the help of our esteemed instructors and enthusiastic students, we are hopeful about getting there very soon.
Arun Goyat firmly believes that India will be the next IT powerhouse. This conviction strongly inspires the vision of CodeQuotient.