The digital world today comprises two kinds of people – digital immigrants and digital natives. The first variety are not born and brought up in the digital world but take to it by choice or compulsion. On the other end of the spectrum are the natives who have easy access and have grown relying on digital technology.

Most workforce fall into either of these categories and for companies to implement effective training strategies, the essence is to focus on – how to be both fast and effective. Although this is a challenge and can be described in different ways, it is about simultaneously increasing speed, keeping control of resources and having a significant impact on the business.

24x7 Learning, looks to address this paradigm with “SkillBridge”, an employability enhancement program and talent management.

“The program aims to upgrade the behavioural and IT skills of fresh engineering and management graduates across India in order to make them truly employable.” says Anil Chhikkara, Co-Founder and President of 24x7 Learning. “Our focus for SkillBridge is primarily on the engineering colleges in the Tier II and Tier III cities where the job-placement records are low due to the students’ skill gaps.

“Besides helping these students acquire the skills required, we will help them get employed with the leading corporates. Our existing relationship with 6 of the top 10 IT companies and 7 of the top 10 ITES companies will help us achieve this goal. SkillBridge will thus help the educational institutes increase their placement records and enhance its branding,” he says in a tête-à-tête with BPO Watch.

The program is a timely one as India Inc. is facing its biggest hiring challenge in decades with Nasscom predicting a talent shortage of 500,000 knowledge workers by 2010. This is further compounded by the fact that only 25% of fresh engineers are employable.

An 8-month program, SkillBridge focuses on imparting the skills required to make the balance 75% employable. The Program aims to prepare the graduates by imparting critical skills like communications, personality development, team work, spoken English, interview preparation etc. delivered in a blended and interactive manner (multimodal simulations, quizzes and on-site workshops).

Moving further up the value chain, the company continues to build the intellectual capital of a company via a holistic approach to training and development. “Talent Management is a business needs focused strategy that helps organizations support and fulfill the skill enhancement needs as human resources move from one phase to another in the talent lifecycle.”

“From pre-hire to leadership phases of Talent Lifecycle, 24x7 Learning provides focused transition programs, growth support programs, leadership support resources and continuing education programs – thus providing an effective Talent Lifecycle management strategy to high growth, talent dependent organizations,” says Anil.

The company partners with enterprises to help them adopt learning initiatives that are aligned to their business objectives and to tackle talent management issues. 24x7 Learning approaches this in a systematic manner. Broadly this would entail consulting with the organization, implementing a customized learning solution and followed by managing the process.

Starting with a small capital, the organisation focussed on developing its own learning management system (LMS) product, LearnTrak. (LMS is the basic platform on which all elearning solutions need to run.) The company also made a strategic decision to target corporates in the first phase of its growth.

Following this goal, it partnered with content providers abroad to host nearly 3,000 courses on its platform, which it offered to clients like Wipro Technologies, Airtel and Touchtel. These courses covered a wide range of areas, both for specific domains like IT, BPO, BFSI and telecom, as well as general communication courses.