India-Based Skill-Lync Promises Engineering Students Jobs Or A Refund

You may or may not have heard of Skill-Lync, an India-based startup that provides high-level engineering courses for students in this field. It is now on the Y Combinator, a program that offers another take on how to fund entrepreneur projects that are still at their early stages. What it promises sounds inviting enough.  Skill-Lync’s courses will help Indian would-be engineers to turn what they learn at school into something that has practical application for their future career.

Skill-Lync started as a bootstrapped project on YouTube. Its initial channel was to share tips on engineering. So far, it has evolved from that humble starting point into a startup that specializes in online courses on the same subject. There are three different types of courses that are currently on Skill-Lync’s offer.

Skill-Lync started as a YouTube channel

India has an estimated number of 1.5 million graduates majored in engineering a year looking for jobs. While these many job seekers might find it difficult to find a good opportunity in the country, they can always find suitable vacancies in other nations. As promising as it may sound, unfortunately, there are many students do not know how to get these jobs.

The startup aims at preparing their enrollees with skill sets that are equivalent to a Master degree in the USA, or what employers seek currently. Skill-Lync does this by designing video-based online courses. The ultimate goal is to prepare its students with the skills and experience appreciated by employers.

Skill-Lync’s learners may watch the videos alone but they must participate in groups on WhatsApp to do assignments together. The teachers will be online on Friday to answer students' questions and other matters.

It is currently focusing on engineering

Each course is made up of units and the fee for one unit is usually $250. They all run deep into the field of mechanic engineering and also the practical application which can be of great help for students in the workplace.

In 2018, Skill-Lync had about 2,500 students with 22% of them complete the whole courses they enrolled in. This rate might sound unimpressive at first but consider how hard the courses are, these many students are something Skill-Lync can be proud of.

This success paves the way for a newly launched course that covers a larger scale and even a promise of a job after completion, or students can demand a refund. This course requires 8 months to study with students spending about 40 hours a week for it. They can also participate with half the time a week but the curriculum will be expanded to 15 months. This course comes at the price of Rs. 245,000 and is available for qualified Indian students. According to Suryanarayanan Paneerselvam and Sarangarajan Iyengar, the two founders of Skill-Lync, this new course focuses on Hybrid Electric Vehicle with all the needed concepts in their development. People interested in this course have until the 15th of March to submit applications.

They hope that if they require more commitment in this one, the completion rate will rise to 67%, double that of currently running courses. They are also working on ways to help students make money while studying by crowdsourcing.

About the refund promise, Paneerselvam shared that they considered education to be like a kind of product. If consumers do not reap the benefits as offered by the manufacturers, they have the right to return it.

Skill-Lync is heading to the US in June with a similar offer for students there, who make up about 10% of enrolment rate each month.

However, for the US market, the company plans for a totally different way to make money out of them. The course will be made free and then when students find jobs, Skill-Lync will gain 15% of their salary in a course of two years. The company will not get more than $20,000 though. Another option is paying $10,000 when they get a job.

Skill-Lync is focusing on engineering but its ambition is to expand to other fields as well. Its founders said that they are working their way to chemical engineering and biotech.

The company will expand to other fields in the future

And in order to do that, they will work with experts in each discipline and also the employers in each field to come up with the courses. This might increase the female participants, a future that the company wants to create as the majority of its students currently are male.

That is not all. Skill-Lync envisions a day when they can eliminate all college-level training and satisfy students' demand for engineering skills. Paneerselvam said that they could be a type of college based on the Internet which spares people of 4 years studying with a comprehensive course that helps them get a job after completion. They are not focusing on this target right now but it is still possible. For now, the founders want to put in more effort to expand their existing courses.

Skill-Lync is in need of around $5 million to realize its immediate goals and joining the Y Combinator is a viable way to achieve that investment. The program is a promising way to bring the startup closer to venture capital.

Y Combinator is a good way for Skill-Lync to raise fund

Paneerselvam said that for what they were currently doing, money was not needed. However, to scale up their project to 30,000 students, much investment is essential.

For now, we do not know much about Skill-Lync's potential to get what it needs but on the bright side, it has chosen the right time to appear. Investors have never been more enthusiastic in putting their money in companies working in online education in India.

A recent success story is from Byju with its $550 million funds to bring its products to the world. The company courses are for learners of grade 4 to 12. It has acquired Osmo with a cost of $120 million. Cosmo was a firm that produced equipment to integrate online and offline study. Other achievements belong to Emeritus, a startup that works with universities to offer online courses with its $40 million investment, and Toppr, a rival of Byju, with $35 million in growth funding round. Toppr’s founder said that the money will be used for branding, raising customers’ awareness of the company, and to further improve their products.