Akshay Munjal has taken it upon himself to solve the problem of underemployment and unemployment with Hero Vired. The online learning platform offers an end-to-end learning ecosystem for professional development and makes students industry-ready for employment
Akshay Munjal, Founder and CEO, Hero Vired
A couple of years ago, as he was driving along the roads of Saket, the hustling upmarket business district in New Delhi, Akshay Munjal came across a few advertisements.
‘Wanted: Graduates or engineers to drive luxury cars’, said the posters stuck across boards near Select City Walk Mall in Saket. Munjal, the grandson of Brij Mohan Munjal, founder of the $5 billion Hero Group, was already a founder at the seven-year-old BML Munjal University in Gurugram, and the man responsible for the group’s education foray in 2014.
“I still have a photo of that poster,” says Munjal. “By the way, the poster is still there in some places in Saket and its nearby area. The reality is that a large percentage of our graduates, whether engineers or management graduates, and others are unemployed or underemployed. Somebody is working as a driver after graduating in engineering. To me, that's not commensurate to the skills they have.”
For many years now, India, which has half of its population below the age of 25, has been grappling with concerns around the quality of its graduates entering the workforce. Every year, as many as nine million graduates finish their education, either ready to join the workforce or pursue higher education. Of this, however, just about 46 percent of graduates are employable, various studies have suggested, raising significant challenges for companies. About five years ago, that number stood at around 33 percent.
“Since I was a part of the higher education sector in India, I took it personally,” says Munjal. “First, we put a team within the university to see what we can do to fix the problem. But we realised that it will create so much confusion within the university. Universities are centres of knowledge and the role of a tier-one university in India and globally should be to create knowledge.”