Bridging deep tech skills gap

BridgeLabz was set up to bridge the impending skill-gap amongst the existing talent pool of Indian engineers by making them job-ready through experiential learning and focused mentorship. Through its Maker Program, the company hires engineers from top institutes and provides them with hands-on training in industry-specific skills, as per the needs of its various partner companies. “In this manner, companies get access to custom-trained engineers based on their talent requirements and engineers are given the security of a job by acquiring product-focused skillsets. The four-month long program acts as a boot-camp for those aspirants who are aiming to join the workforce in the emerging technology space, and the expenses for the course are borne by the partner companies,” says Narayan Mahadevan, CEO, BridgeLabz, adding that its inception in 2016, BridgeLabz has succeeded in making more than 1300+ engineers employable pan-India. Through its Maker Program, it has placed them at companies such as Yatra, Fullerton, Urban Ladder and Capgemini, who are part of its partner network of 250+ top companies in the country.

Mahadevan informs that the company is also conducting a series of coding bootcamps in the coming year to help engineering talent upskill and equip them with robust, industry-oriented skillsets. It has plans for rapid expansion, to increase its reach to a larger number of engineers and grow its partner network to 500 companies across the country.

“BridgeLabz looks at itself as an Employability Operating System (OS). As in any OS it needs to help interfacing between stakeholders – here the talent and the hiring company and provide a host of features which allow for the interface to be complete and mutually beneficial,” explains Mahadevan. The programs include : Basic Tech Quotient (freshers) – recently launched and supported by CodinClub – BridgeLabz’s 30 day online coding bootcamp; Deep Tech Quotient (freshers) – support by BridgeLabz’s 16 week Fellowship Program; Lateral talent (new to organisation) – supported by program launched in partnership with Upgrad; upskilling of existing engineering talent pool – recently launched program “BLUE- BridgeLabz lateral upgrade and enhancement” ; remote engineering ( global workforce for an organisation).

According to Mahadevan, all these programs have a unique experiential learning program at its core which ensures that talent is ready with coding fundamentals in varying degrees as needed by the hiring organisations.

For startups and enterprises, the advantage is that the talent is tailor-made to specific requirements of tech organisations, especially for the deep tech needs. “This ensures that there is at least a 200 per cent RoI for the organisation compared to the other traditional hiring channels,” remarks Mahadevan.

Along with its client organisations in India, BridgeLabz is now in talks with companies overseas to support them in a similar way through the distributed or remote engineering program.

Speaking about the impact of the Covid-19 crisis on the startup scenario, Mahadevan says, “It is difficult to comment on the entire startup ecosystem as such but one thing is for sure – this forced situation is giving birth to a lot of innovation in the space and very quickly. Those that can adapt will not only survive but thrive in the “new normal” situation. The need of the hour is to embrace everything digital and bring all the business processes online as possible. We have been able to do this quite seamlessly and hence are confident of a strong future.”

In the future the company will be extending its CodinClub to colleges, universities and institutes so they can support their students and go deeper into the heartland of India to identify promising talent.

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