Ed-tech companies have been witnessing an increased traction in demand for soft skills and communication-based programmes particularly from semi urban and rural markets with a large number of parents enrolling their children for overall personality development.

While some edtech companies are specifically focusing on this category and designing courses to meet their demand, others, which have been so far focusing on providing test preparation and academic tuition-based services, are looking to enlarge their product offering by introducing communication skills-based programmes.

According to Maneesh Dhooper, Co-founder, PlanetSpark, career and life skill-based courses is the fastest growing segment in the market at present - though it is not the largest share of the overall pie. But the segment is expected to grow substantially in the next five years.

‘Global demand’

“Communication skills and confidence is one of the most important skills that parents want in their children. The need is high and the demand is global. However, these skills are rarely taught anywhere and people didn’t believe that a reliable and structured option to develop communication skills of their children existed. With live learning coming of age in the past two years, we are the first global company to structure a program on new-age communication skills for kids,” Dhooper told BusinessLine.

PlanetSpark is an edtech company that offers live 1:1 classes in public speaking and creative writing for children aged 4-16. The company’s curriculum includes storytelling, debate, podcasting, stand-up comedy, poetry and much more. Growing at 30 per cent month-on-month, the company currently has close to 22,000 students on its platform from across 13 countries. It grew 45X over the past year and plans to grow further by 30X over the next two years.

It recently raised $ 13.5 million from Prime Venture Partners and marquee global entrepreneurs including Binny Bansal, Deep Kalra, Ashish Gupta, Gokul Rajaram, and Shirish Nandkarni, in a Series-B round. The freshly infused funds will be deployed towards aggressive business growth, product development and international expansion.

Market for communication skills

The global market for communication skills is estimated to be over $80 billion and remains largely untapped. According to industry experts, India offers a pool of 1.8 million potential and current English teachers who can impart these skills to the entire globe.

“We plan to hire 50,000 teachers on our platform by the end of 2022. Overall, this is a golden opportunity to build the world leader in communication skills that didn’t exist till now,” Dhooper said.

Safalta.com (Safalta Education Pvt Ltd), which provides personalised online coaching for various competitive exams, also offers programmes to develop the communication skills of individuals particularly in smaller towns and cities with a view to make them more “job ready”.

“In India the entire focus has been more on developing the hard skills or academic part of an individual. But now with the New Education Policy we see this changing. We expect a lot of action to happen on this (soft skills) segment,” said Himanshu Gautam, Co-founder & CEO of Safalta.

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW