New Age Learning for Industry 4.0

By Sriram Rajagopal, CEO and Founder, Diamondpick and Vikas Gupta, MD, Wiley India

The second talk in the series of InnovationNXT Talk in the Wiley Global Innovation Conclave, 2019 was taken forward Sriram Rajagopal, CEO and Founder, Diamondpick and Vikas Gupta, MD, Wiley India who shed light on the importance of New Age Learning for Industry 4.0.

Vikas Gupta began this session with what is the solution that Wiley is building with all the inputs from the academy and the industry. It is not about a product or service. The question is whether it is changing the way we are looking at learning and education.

We are not here to replace the colleges or the professors or the entire education system. We are looking at complimenting it. So that the needs of the colleges and industries can be met simultaneously. People talk about bridge curriculum, we feel it is a nice way to enable learning, a solution for the long run.

Wiley is bringing the best of both worlds says Vikas Gupta. It is bringing innovation and learning together and is trying to build a platform which brings them together - The conceptual learning by professors and the Business content. Both are integrated into the curriculum and acts as an add on leading to the students coming out as well generated professionals.

Sriram Rajagopal here asked, What is happening in the IT sector especially in Tech? There is a lot of change happening in the hiring models, necessitated by change in client profiles. Digital disruption automation is changing the way clients look at talent, company looks at talent and as a result we had to change the way we were generating that capacity. Large parts of this pool still come Universities even today. Gone are the days of Industrialized IT solutions. Today it’s a lot more about digital transformation, data science, AI and IOT.

He explained that Future Job Roles will not come readymade with the curriculum that you have within the college, as a result, growth within companies has moderated. Industry growth is compensated by automation and a level of productivity that we have never seen before.

Slow and Stabilizing growth is the cause whose effect is companies revisiting hiring strategies. The response to this in three fold - Just In Time Hiring, Broader approach to fulfillment channels and Immediate billable hire.

Firms looking at options of going to the market; finding people that are ready and focus on finding people in the most effective manner. How much time and money is spent on training the new talent? We live in a world who will ask these questions/ As a consequence, just in hiring happens.

The need of the hour is for education to be relevant to what firms are looking for. We need to work with Universities to understand where this gap is; therefore we create a bridge between firms and universities to get people ready for work.

WileyNXT inculcates Job Roles as courses that students can take if they want Jobs in any of these areas and companies are looking for Real World Problem Solving Skills, Creative thinking skills and real programming skills.

Vikas Gupta said after an extensive survey and working with companies, they found students coming from Two-Tier cities are more motivated. He further spoke about how WileNXT is programmed to transform talent with Bite sized learning, contextual and conceptual formulated by Academia Professionals, Industry Professionals and Researchers. WileyNXT also has a regular assessment system and real skill testing.

WileyNXT is the best of what is consumable from 30-40 companies in one go.