PhysicsWallah plans foray into upskilling, govt test prep

Once the pandemic faded out, there was a strong student sentiment towards offline classes. They wanted to see their teachers and take live offline classes. That’s why we decided to launch offline. At that time, everyone told us that we were late in doing so, because we launched our offline classes in June and by that time, other conventional offline players had already taken in admissions. However, student sentiment and their trust towards our brand was very strong. When we launched the offline courses, we received 3 times more admissions than what we had actually expected. We were expecting 10,000 students, but we got 30,000 admissions, that, too, in the Kota centre alone.

This kind of offline presence helps in brand penetration. Today, students and teachers know the PW brand. However, in the case of parents, they get a lot of reinforcement around the brand when they see an offline centre. It also helps our ability to target a much younger student segment like classes 6-8 students. This is the segment where parents are the decision makers. So, if parents are already aware of the brand, their trust increases and so does our brand penetration.

Poaching is not the right word. We define poaching as when you target one player and you try to poach a lot of teachers from them, to the extent of disturbing the operations of the counterpart. We have not indulged in any such activities. We always had a database of teachers. Alakh Pandey (CEO) invited teacher applications on YouTube, and we got 4,000 applications within a span of 30 minutes. So, within the teacher fraternity, the PW brand is very stable. I can authoritatively say that PW has established itself as a very stable, secure and long foresighted brand among the teachers fraternity as well.

If you go to conventional offline coachings, teachers generally use a whiteboard. In PW, all our offline classrooms are digital boards. In such classrooms, the teacher needs to have some level of comfort and familiarity with the technology. Tech is also involved in post classes. All our classrooms are recorded and made available on the application for students. Further, to keep the classrooms interactive, our teachers have to also run simulations during the class. So there’s a lot of technological hand-holding we do for the teachers who come on board. We cannot expect technological expertise from a teacher. Currently, of the 600 educators in the PW team, the number of educators involved in this programme of hand-holding new educators is around between 50 to 100.

Currently, we sit at a very lucrative point in the student journey – which is the 11-12 test prep and board examination. These students have been associated with us for the last few years and are now graduating to the higher levels.. So we want to sync our growth journey with our students. As these students graduate and go to colleges, they would eventually look for employment opportunities. India’s college courses are not attuned to employment and so we want to enter the upskilling segment. Some of our students would want to divert their careers to government examination prep, so that is also a potential growth area for us. Then, we also want to explore test prep for PG (post graduate) for medical and engineering exams. We have made some progress in these areas but it is too early to talk about it in detail. We want to enter all these categories and build it organically. Some acquisitions here and there are on the cards, but mostly we will build it organically.