Skill Lync Bridging The Engineering Skill Gap, Helping Students Land Their Dream Jobs

Now more than ever, every technical programme student needs to be well skilled. The job market is flooded with resumes, but only the ones with the right skills can get into the companies of their choice.

India has more than 6000 engineering colleges but the quality and standard of the majority of these institutions continue to remain far from being satisfactory. The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) notified a revised model curriculum for all engineering courses two years ago, but a large number of colleges continue to have outdated teaching methods and have no practical industry exposure to equip their students with the required skills. As a result, students face difficulty in getting a good job.

The employability rate of students in the core engineering streams like Mechanical and Civil is low.

Skill-Lync, a Chennai-based EdTech startup, is on a mission to bridge the skill gap that exists between the industry and academia and help engineering students scale up to their dream careers. With its unique platform, this Ed-Tech firm offers several job-oriented courses for Mechanical, Electrical, Computer Science, and Civil Engineering students in India and around the world.

Initially started as a YouTube channel to share engineering tips for the benefit of students, Skill-Lync is today one of the most popular Ed-Tech platforms offering online training courses for engineering students to help them acquire the skills required in the industry. The Ed Tech company was officially founded by its CTO Sarangarajan V and CEO Suryanarayanan P (CEO) in April 2018, with the growing demand of its YouTube channel. Global investors including Better Capital’s Vaibhav Domkundwar, YCombinator, and Founder of Gmail & YC Partner Paul Buchheit have supported the start-up.

Skill-Lync offers different types of courses, ranging from one-off modules to full-time Master’s programs. Skill-Lync has developed the coursework in partnership with industry experts. The courses not only include video lectures but industry-oriented projects as well. Every student works on industry-oriented projects as part of their curriculum with the help of software tools such as ANSYS, MathWorks, Converge, GT-Suite, and many more. Skill-Lync also offers on-demand courses combined with an online live-support model. Skill-Lync offers Masters in Electric Vehicle Design and Simulations coursework, first of its kind programme focusing on the subject.

To provide in-depth learning on Electric Vehicles to undergraduate engineering students in India, Skill-Lync has joined hands with design simulation software provider ANSYS in November last year to launch a free basic course in Electric Vehicle (EV) technology. The courses cover different mechanical and electrical aspects of simulations with respect to an Electric Vehicle including design, manufacturing, repair, maintenance, and setting up of the charging infrastructure. As part of this partnership, ANSYS has provided access to their various software suites to create an introductory level course in understanding the basics of the electric vehicle.

With Electric Vehicles starting to become a viable source of transportation, it is important for students in their undergrad studies to understand the different aspects of electric vehicles. Students of engineering and science streams can enroll in this online course via Skill-Lync’s platform.

Skill-Lync is part of the Union education ministry’s National Educational Alliance for Technology (NEAT) initiative. Under the initiative, the AICTE announced a partnership with Skill-Lync in May 2020 to ensure that there is no hiatus in engineering students’ education during the nation-wide lockdown imposed in March to check the spread of the Covid-19 virus in the country. Under this partnership, Skill-Lync has started the Mechanical Engineers Essentials programme for students. There have been upto 15,000 subscribers to the online coursework and the number is still growing with each passing day.

Given the extended at-home learning requirements that the industry is catering to, the partnership between the AICTE and Skill-Lync is aimed at accelerating the online learning process for mechanical, electrical, computer science, and civil engineering students. During the Covid-19 induced lockdown, Skill-Lync saw a significant increase in the number of visitors to its website and the YouTube channel. While its YouTube channel, which contains free technical webinars and explanations on short technical concepts, witnessed 6-fold growth in viewership, its website saw 3x growth in traffic since February last year with students visiting the company’s YouTube channel and website to view the contents from India, US, Europe, UAE, South Korea, Saudi, Singapore, Japan and many other countries.