How did I create Vidhya Skill School and leave a well-paying career with good offers from firms like Microsoft, Swiggy, Cisco, Meesho, and others?
I was doing well in my job and always want to work on challenging projects. As a result, I began attending hackathons to satisfy my interest, and I have already participated in 39 hackathons, winning 17 of them on a national level.
I got a lot of offers from amazing firms during hackathons and outside as well since I worked alongside brilliant brains and like-minded individuals. From barely earning a single rupee for an year after graduation to receiving offers from Microsoft and other industry leaders after gaining decent tech skills after 5.9 years.
I still remember that day, when my ex-project manager Ratnajit Vichare of LTI saw one of my post about my hackathon & congratulated me & asked
Hey Ankit, Why don’t you start helping people what you know? Many individuals have been harmed as a result of this covid, and they are suffering a lot of employment insecurity. They need a lot of help and direction. Would you want to help out? Consider this…
After that chat, I couldn’t sleep and wondered what I could do from my end, as rather than making a donation, I wanted to do something. Later, the thought occurs to me of launching some free up-skilling sessions for individuals and assisting them in their growth.
I quickly switched on my Laptop and created the application form for up-skilling named as Vidhya Classes.
- Web Development
- Web Designing
- Mobile Development
- DevOps with AWS
- Quality Assurance
- Cyber Security
- Photo Editing
- Project Planning & Management
& published it over LinkedIn , WhatsApp & Facebook in the month of April 2020. I got shocked since there were 25+ registration & started receiving enquires from my connections & peers to join my free courses.
I started promoting it in my network on a regular basis & promoted for next 7 days & started getting tons of calls, messages & request for joining my skill improvement programs.
THE COMMON QUESTION WHICH I WAS GETTING IS,, what is “Vidhya Classes”? I replied that, it’s dedicated to my grandfather.
Since his name was Late Shri Vidhyaram Ji Jain, hence these classes are dedicated to him.
Guess what! At the end of 7th day i was having 93 registrations + 12 Direct request in my queue for attending my skilling courses & we picked two courses since majority of people was interested in that domain only.
- Full Stack Engineering using MERN Stack
- DevOps Engineering with AWS
I received requests from people with all degrees of expertise, ranging from 0 to 6 years, and mentoring someone for the first time was a great experience for me.
I was juggling a lot of things at the time, so they were challenging days for me. Managing things on your own is not simple; back then, I worked as an HR, a Tech Instructor, an employee, and so on, but it was a fantastic learning experience.
Daily regular work
- My Full time job
- Cooking after classes
- Cleaning utensils at night
- Side learning & Hackathons &
- A lot more
Vidhya Classes
- Taking 2 Classes after office
- Calling people on a daily basis to sync & update
- Scheduling daily calls on Zoom, since using free account
- Evaluating everyone’s assignments on GitHub
- Studying 3–4 hours at midnight for next day preparation
- Mentoring people
- Doing 1:1 to solve their issues
My weekend was totally packed since meeting so many people to solve their issues & help them fixing their personal problems as well.
During this journey, one of my friends, Ankit Gupta, was instrumental in cheering me up and encouraging me to keep going. Since my undergraduate days, he has always trusted me and cheered me up in all aspects of my life.
I did those classes for next 2.5 months then came back to my hometown i.e. Morena Madhya Pradesh. Later people started reaching out to me to help them get jobs as well. HENCE I STARTED WONDERING LIKE HOW CAN I DO THIS? HENCE I CONTACTED ONE OF MY CLOSE FRIEND Ankesh Jain, & shared each & everything. Hence he recommended me to do an experiment with few people who should be in our current network & badly need a job in Software Engineering field.
Later we announced #Cohort2 & enrolled 5 people & rigorously worked with them to get jobs in few months. The interesting fact was that those people was not even from Software background but worked either as a support engineer or from some other IT domain.
Results — 80% Placements, 1 person decided to pursue a non-IT career during training period.
Then we announced Cohort 3
After seeing the incredible trip, we announced #Cohort3 and received over 100 applications, but only 9 persons were chosen for this cohort in March 2021. We took a different approach and decided to use Google Meet. Because it was free, I was also quite clear that I didn’t want to spend my time creating software and instead concentrate on fixing the issue.
We have changed Vidhya Classes to Vidhya Skill School
As a result, we worked with the #Cohort3 batch for the following four months, and three workers were eliminated in the meantime due to scheduling conflicts. One was hired within a month, and we worked with the other five persons diligently after that. We all worked as a family and as a team, day and night, to transform their profession and financial situation. We have received 100% placements with decent packages and incomes as a result of our tremendous efforts, sleepless nights, devotion, trust, and fantastic work.
The starting salary for fresher was 6.5 LPA, while the highest was 23.8 LPA. We were all ecstatic to witness everyone’s hard work and accomplishments. I can never forget those long Google Meet & Phone calls. We were not only focusing on their technical abilities, but also on their overall development, such as communication, design, writing, presentation, social profiling, and mental skills.
Then we announced Cohort 4
This time we received 386+ impressions, which was a shock for all of us & after evaluations & interviews we have shortlisted 20 people & started working with them & rigorously worked with them.
- We started with software engineering
- Then Frontend engineering
- Design & architecting skills
- SASS CSS
- JavaScript
- TypeScript
- React
- Redux
- NodeJS
- AWS & a lot more
We worked rigorously with them & helped them attain decent engineering skills ranging from
- Communication
- Writing
- Presentation
- Technical
- Analytical &
- Problem understanding
I always believe that people should learn problem understanding first before problem solving. Since sometimes we’re in too rush to jump into the results & don’t even try to understand what they need to solve
We have decided that we’re going to reject every assignment if they’re not submitting the algorithm first.
The best of Cohort 4 is that, we reached out to the creator of SASS i.e. Hampton Catlin & requested him to visit us & guess what he liked our concept & agreed to visit us for a session.
This is what Hamton said — I’ve been to several bootcamps, but I’ve never seen such finely polished work & fundamental engineering abilities & utilisation of core features anyplace else.
That was one of the most memorable days of our lives, since we all had the opportunity to meet the developer of something that practically every major corporation, including ours, now uses. Later, we welcomed a number of outstanding individuals who not only shared their expertise with all of our aspirants, but also greatly aided them in their rapid growth.
During that time, I was leading Nuvolo’s entire mobile team and receiving great offers from companies such as Microsoft, Meesho, Swiggy, Cisco, Quillbot, and many others. After a wonderful journey with Nuvolo, I decided to move forward, but deep down, I wanted to dedicate my full time to Vidhya Skill School because I couldn’t give it the attention it deserved.
As a result, during my notice period, I decided to come full time and did my hardest to persuade my parents. They ultimately decided to let me do this full time after a lot of stress, difficulties, and limits, and I joined Vidhya Skill School as a full time mentor. It was a difficult choice for me to make since leaving a good pay and offers from top companies is not simple. My family, however, has remained supportive of my choice, and we are currently working to the best of our abilities to tackle skilling and job issues.
Later my family surprised me with a startup shower, where we gathered over 100 relatives to offer me their blessings for my business.
It was one of the most beautiful & amazing day of my life.
So far, 80% of our Cohort 4 hopefuls have been placed in parallel, and we’re working with the remaining 20% to ensure 100% success.
We have 9 hiring partners on board that recruit industry-ready engineers straight from us, and we’re working with more to get them onboard.
Now we’re running our Cohort 7 & 8
We are now working with Cohort 7 & 8 to help them become job-ready. We’ve chosen 15 folks from this group and are working with them to improve their abilities in JavaScript Full Stack domain using MERN Stack.
We’re also skilling 5 engineers on DevOps with Amazon Web Services AWS as part of Cohort 7.1.
In addition, our Cohort 9 applications is up and taking applications for Frontend, Backend, FullStack.
There are many more things we have done at Vidhya Skill School, stay tuned to get more updates :D
