Skills, Training and Research in Vocational Education Services (I) Pvt Ltd (STRiVE), an IFMR Trust investee company, is a business with an innovative mission.
It seeks to train and place youth from rural areas and small towns at entry-level positions in business corporations, in India's highly competitive job market.
STRiVE founder and CEO Suresh Mutyala is well equipped to deal with the challenge.
A post-graduate from IIM, Kolkata, specialising in sales and distribution (financial services and banking), he joined Onida for two-and-half years where he was in charge of the Telangana region (Andhra Pradesh), before shifting to a consortium of Kotak Mahindra Financial Services and Ford Credit, in charge of car finance across a vast territory: Punjab, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Orissa, etc.
Mutyala then did a short stint with ICICI Bank, in 2003, before returning to Kotak, operationalising the first branch of Kotak Mahindra Bank in Hyderabad and moving up quickly to become area manager.
It was then that the idea of STRiVE struck. "Almost 30% of my time was spent interviewing prospective employees and I was not happy with the quality and quantity of candidates," Mutyala explains.
It was, he notes, a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, thousands of people were in desperate need of a good job. On the other, corporations were equally desperate for good candidates. But a match between good jobs and good candidates was just not happening. "This impasse got me thinking about training people."
In April-May 2006, Mutyala and a few friends including Anil S G (now Senior Vice President, IFMR Trust) brainstormed on sourcing and training candidates from the untapped ocean that was rural India.
With support from IFMR Trust, STRiVE was registered in May 2007; it began operations five months later.
Since then, it has been growing exponentially in different areas.
Till August 2008, STRiVE had trained and placed around 600 candidates for positions in various industry verticals like insurance, retail, financial services, domestic call centres and mobile service-providers.
Its corporate client list includes SGF Telecom, Tata Tele Services, IFMR Trust, and ICICI Prudential.
The jobs are mostly in sales/customer relations.
STRiVE helps candidates meet such basic requirements as proficiency in spoken English, etiquette and grooming, and computer skills.
Based in Hyderabad, STRiVE has a good presence in Andhra Pradesh. It has also successfully forayed into Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu, organising its own 'employment fairs' called STRiVE Xchange.
At the core of the organisation's growth are appropriately designed training courses, at an attractive cost -- typically, one-to-one-and-a-half times the expected salary of a candidate when s/he is placed after training.
STRiVE conducts the training through local partners.
Getting students
Getting students interested in the courses was not easy. The biggest obstacle was the various vocational training programmes being offered by the state government and NGOs, which are generally free. It was difficult convincing prospective candidates to pay for a similar training course.
K Pawan Kumar, Business Development Manager, explains how his team goes about the task.
"We begin by mapping colleges, offering courses at 10+2 or higher levels. My team then discusses the STRiVE concept with the head of the institution or relevant department heads. After convincing them we make a detailed presentation before the college principal, department heads and students."
The presentation, which could stretch to over an hour, covers the current employment scenario, STRiVE's role, and its clients. This is followed by an interactive session with students and teachers. Those interested in learning more are given brochures, invited to register, and told to visit STRiVE at their convenience.
The business development team approached village headmen and opinion-makers, offering cash incentives to people who "usually hang around paan, barber and tea shops and read newspapers all day," to identify prospective students.
Partner network
STRiVE also looked around for potential local training partners.
The deal offered was that STRiVE would share the concept, handle content and help train the first batch of students until the partner's own trainer was ready. This meant it was responsible for quality control and placements, on a revenue sharing basis, while the partner was responsible for providing infrastructure, getting students, and handling the day-to-day administration.
Typically, partners in Andhra Pradesh are small computer education institutes with a reasonably trained faculty, infrastructure, and educated promoters.
Working with partners, STRiVE spread its message by getting involved in village self-help group meetings, using traditional dance-and-drama teams, and participating in informal meetings with the village youth.
Results started coming in from various quarters. Twenty-five students enrolled from Devarkonda village in Nalgonda district, which consists largely of tribal hamlets. In Karim Nagar, around 1,000 college students attended the STRiVE session; more than 100 of them enrolled. In Bhongir, in Nalgonda district, the promoter of Appy Computers, a small-time computer institute with five computers, decided to work with STRiVE and roped in 20 students.
After training students, STRiVE faces another formidable obstacle: convincing companies that candidates from rural areas are suited for the job. "Many HR managers still associate 'rural' with 'backward', 'inadequate' and 'not fitting in'," says Mutyala.
Trained candidates from rural areas come with their own mental baggage. Some do not like to be seen working in the retail sector in their own villages and towns where such jobs are not considered prestigious. Also, many rural youth do not aspire very high, leading to them quitting their jobs for flimsy reasons.
Moving ahead
Even as it tackles these challenges, STRiVE is moving ahead rapidly.
It proposes to set up a vocational academy with Collabrant Incubators for training in service sector jobs, through a network of 300 partners, in five years. This will give it a presence in every second district in India and the capability to reach out to students from very interior pockets.
It is working with Aajeevika Bureau, an NGO based in Udaipur (Rajasthan), which works with migrant labourers; STRiVE has trained around 500 labourers.
Looking ahead, Mutyala identifies challenges on three fronts: content, certification, volumes. As he explains, STRiVE is based on a high-volume business model, requiring that it tie up with hundreds of training partners over the next three years, penetrate more locations per district and tie up more corporate demand.
STRiVE also plans to establish STRiVE Xchanges in non-metro cities.
Explains Mutalya, "Students would be able to register and undergo screening tests for various organisations and training courses. We will help students make a choice of career or course best suited to their profile. STRiVE Xchanges will also help students in grooming, soft skills, making CVs and interviewing skills."
A big opportunity at hand is a post-graduate programme in insurance management, supported by ICICI Prudential, which seeks to recruit thousands of unit managers and financial services consultants, in 2009. Under this arrangement, STRiVE will not be training people but sourcing candidates who meet ICICI Prudential's criteria.
STRiVE is also working on a non-trainer-led course for basic skills, for students who cannot afford high fees. The course would prepare them for placement in small and medium enterprises (SMEs).
Says Mutalya, "Our vision is to become the leading non-IT training institute in the country."
