The Education System Isn’t At Par With Technological Advancements: Ankush Singla, Coding Ninjas

What made you start Coding Ninjas? And when?

Coding Ninjas started its operations in 2016 for students pursuing a future in programming to offer more accessible and industry-relevant content. Seeing a dearth of proficient programmers after acquiring a degree impacted the job market at large due to which we established this space for students to grasp quality education to up-skill and re-skill their programming proficiency. The idea was to match education with the speed of technology that is changing at a fast pace. Our observation was that the course curriculum in leading programming institutions was centralised and not at par with the ever-evolving tech industry trends and demands and lacked practical exposure. The key reason for bad job scenarios is that the education system isn’t at par with the technological advancements and the big firms are hiring via colleges where the students lack programming skills. On the other hand, the MOOCs in the Indian diaspora wasn’t performing well as it required a more personalised approach to enhance the student experience. Today, we take pride in revolutionising the edtech ecosystem with our state-of-the-art course curriculum and innovative teaching methodologies to enhance the student experience by up-skilling them to stay industry-relevant and to get lucrative job opportunities.

What was the total capital investment?

The total capital investment was 50 lakhs in capital expenditure in setting up the office and first offline learning centre.

Which firms are your potential competitors? And what is your strategy to stay in the market?

In the college market, our main competition is from local offline players who run small learning centres in coding education in various cities. We consider them competition because they still attract students who want to learn in offline setup only. In the online world, though we are the market leader in the college market, we do see some competition from multi-discipline platforms such as Coursera, Udemy and many more because of their extremely low price points. For us to stay relevant in the market, we focus a lot on student experience and the learning outcomes of the students. This results in better skilling, job opportunities, brand among employers and overall a good reputation of our content and pedagogy among students. We are proud to say that we have a massive reach across college students in India.

What makes you different from your rivals? How is the firm making a difference when we have lots of similar firms in the market?

There are a lot of things which Coding Ninjas do differently than others which include the following:

Localised Content: Our content is taught by Indian teachers and available in both English and Hindi formats.

Pre-Recorded Course Content: This feature enables and ensures to offer only the top quality content every time for each student.

Live Doubt Support: Coding requires an active doubt resolution support for which we have one of the largest, decentralised team of Teaching Assistants, who resolve doubts of each student daily.

Structured and Updated Content: What we teach is structured in a format relevant to each course and the content is updated to ensure it is in line with industry requirement

Our platform is built for Coding Education: Our platform boasts inbuilt Multi-Language Editor, Cloud Compiler, Auto Evaluation and TA Support, all built into a single platform.

What is the impact of COVID-19 crisis on the firm? And how is it coping up with the same?

The immediate impact of COVID is a little mixed on our business. We have seen high uptake of our courses during this time and we are doing above 150 per cent of our targets each month. Many students are utilising their time for upskilling themselves and they have more time to spear. However, in our Career Camp business, which is linked to the job guarantee, we expect a little slowdown due to a decrease in jobs in the market. Overall, our work and productivity have not suffered. We are an online-only business and most of the teams are geared to work remotely. We had set-up the Work From Home feature a week before lockdown to prepare ourselves in case the situation worsens.

What is the annual revenue in the recent financial year of your firm?

In the year financial year 2019-20, we taught more than 12000 students alone and we are doing 3.5 folds growth on a month on month basis.

What are your business expansion strategies?

We are venturing in the international markets taking our courses to South East Asia and the Middle East. Additionally, we are launching new courses for our current market as well, designed keeping the industry relevance in mind. The idea is to be the de facto coding education company for everyone across the globe and age groups.