L&T to launch online engineering courses

The online education space, hitherto dominated by start-ups, has now caught the attention of engineering and construction giant Larsen & Toubro. The company is set to enter the online engineering education space with the launch of L&T Edutech in September.

The new venture will introduce industry-led application-based learning for engineering students to improve their employability.

SN Subrahmanyan, MD and CEO of L&T, told BusinessLine that L&T Edutech will focus on engineering education across sectors including civil, electrical, mechanical, production and chemical. “Our engineering course will have a lot of practical examples based on L&T’s experiences. The courses will be more practical-oriented than theoretical,” he added.

Nagendran Sundararajan, former international business head of Manipal Global Education, is leading L&T’s new venture.

The venture is part of L&T’s plan to adopt digital technologies to future-proof its businesses. In addition to edutech, it will be launching Sufin, a financial supply platform to establish L&T’s presence in the e-commerce marketplace.

Public-facing platforms

“L&T has decided to begin two ventures to build public-facing platforms that could be new businesses. Thus, the edutech and Sufin ventures were formed. This is L&T’s first foray into the promising platforms business. These are being grown ground-up and will become valuable digital properties for L&T when they go into production and scale up in a couple of years,” Subrahmanyan said.

L&T Edutech will focus on three areas — employability assessment and recruitment, reinforced learning, reskilling and vocational skills training.

For professors, too

According to Subrahmanyan, the engineering courses will not just be useful for students but also professors teaching in other institutes to understand the needs of industries.

Though India churns out lakhs of engineering students every year, reports have pointed out that over 80 per cent are unemployable as they lack technical and practical knowledge. L&T has leveraged its internal training expertise to build platforms that could enhance the prospects of engineering students.