How did you come into the field of education and skilling, and what led to the creation of Kraftshala?
I kind of accidentally became interested in education. I did Engineering and then MBA straight after. Then work for Nestle as a brand manager. There started thinking about what I wanted to do next. My mother was an educationist, so that influence took me to education and saw competitive exams as the biggest space. But unfortunately, at that time, I was too much of an MBA. I quit my job, I started building that product. I’m doing this alone. But as I started meeting 16- and 17-year-olds preparing for these exams, I realized they were so stressed and unhappy that I felt my product wasn’t really helping. I worked on it for about 10 months, launched it, but it didn’t do very well, so I quickly shut it down.
After that, I decided I didn’t want to go back to a corporate job. Instead, I wanted to work on projects that are close to my heart and figured out that my real learning came from my job even though I studied at a reputed B-school can be taken to students as expert sessions. I started with my own alma mater FMS, then took sessions at SPJ. Around then, my partner, Eshu Sharma, joined me. That was a turning point. I had learned not to build something alone, and once he came in, the sessions became much better. By the end of 2016, after a session for around 400 students in Ahmedabad turned out to be a huge success, I knew this was what I wanted to do. Scale it up as a program. Soon we were delivering it to 30-40 top B-schools.
You went online much before it became the norm, especially for a field like marketing skilling. What prompted that decision? And how did you make it effective and acceptable?
Going online wasn’t really a strategic choice—it was a necessity. Our students were already enrolled in business schools across the country. If we wanted to reach students simultaneously at these institutions, there was simply no practical way to do it physically. Running the programme online was the only way to scale and therefore we were forced.
Coming to our education philosophy, we brainstormed over the basics of how one learns best, what motivates one to learn and knew how one learns best and then how to sustain our model. Learning by doing under the guidance of practitioners is considered best. That’s what we told ourselves, to recreate such a package online. So, we started collaborating with companies for their projects and trained students on them. Second, what will motivate students to really give it their best because learning doesn’t happen without it. We brought in placement and made that promise tangible. Initially, I reached out to some of my connections in the FMCG world and very you know like graciously Nestle becomes the first one to back us. And that allowed us to bring a sort of legitimacy to a very new entity as well. Between 2017 and 20, we kind of spread our programs. The top 30, 40 schools, their best marketing and sales students are taking our programs.
What prompted you to venture outside this niche and open up it to virtually to everyone?
We were only getting a few hours a week with the students. They were already enrolled in a business school. It came to our minds that the actual need was of the students which are beyond these top elite B-schools. What happens to the student who’s in not in the top 100, 200, 500 business school or is not even in a business school? This was an opportunity that had been kind of, you know, like paining us immediately after we established ourselves. And then we figured, we can’t take our course to them in this format. We started building fresh and that’s when we start what I call our business school journey for full-scale programs and make sure that you own admissions, training and placements. It is 2020, our first program is Marketing Launchpad.
And then Covid 19 pandemic struck. What was its impact on your journey?
We wanted to launch it in May and then COVID happens in March. We don’t know how the jobs are going to be. We got delayed, but we eventually launched it, I think open applications in mid-September and started the first batch in end of November. Our launch is based on this very simple insight that we will take accountability for your outcomes. We don’t give degrees and frankly everybody enrolling in the program has a degree. So degree is not what is needed because you already have it. Now what you need is employability, skill. And for that you have to commit to the process. They learn by doing projects and all this learning that we have built over these years of training students really comes to play.
What is the USP of Kraftshala’s programmes?
Our philosophy is simple: every student must succeed. Every single student. It is not enough for only the top performers to secure excellent placements. Success is meaningful only when students at the top, the middle, and the bottom of the class all have access to good career opportunities.
Achieving this requires us to look beyond placements as a standalone process. In fact, placement begins with admissions. We must ensure that we admit students who are genuinely aligned with the careers they aspire to pursue. If a student accepts a job that doesn’t match their interests or aspirations, they may join the company but soon become dissatisfied. Within a few months, they will begin searching for another opportunity. Eventually, companies notice this pattern and may hesitate to recruit from us again. So, while the student may have the technical ability to perform the job, long-term success depends on the right fit and motivation. For us, therefore, placement is not merely a placement issue—it is fundamentally an admissions issue.
The second aspect is training. Our training programs are designed to benefit every student, not just the highest achievers. While we certainly challenge our top performers with more advanced opportunities, we never neglect students in the middle or lower segments. Each student receives the support, mentoring, and skill development needed to progress. Our objective is that everyone continues to improve and compete at their own highest potential.
The third aspect is the placement process itself. We don’t charge our recruiters any money. For them, we are a no-cost hiring platform. If you go to hire in college, you will only get talent in June, you will get it in July, for that too you will have to hire in January. If you hire 50 people, you don’t know if they will join 20 or 30. You don’t have to plan that far ahead and this is how business is. It’s so up and down right now. So it’s a great solution for them that on demand, free of cost, Talent that is deeply interested in their domain and wants to work in those kinds of companies. So you take that kind of a deal to companies. It’s a deal that is fantastic. A deal which is great for them but it is open, fair. And so gradually what has happened is that we have been able to broad-base our relationship with all of the recruiting partners and become a largest supplier of talent.
| Brief Course Info: Until 2025, Kraftshala offered only online programs. It has now expanded its portfolio with two 9-month, campus-based postgraduate programs: PGP in AI-led Marketing and PGP in AI-led Sales, Marketing & Business. These complement its existing online offerings—Marketing Launchpad and Marketing Launchpad Emerging Talent.
The six-month Marketing Launchpad is available in both full-time and part-time formats. The full-time program runs on weekdays from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., while the part-time option is designed for working professionals, with classes on Tuesday and Thursday evenings and full-day sessions on Sundays. Marketing Launchpad Emerging Talent includes English language training for students who need to improve their communication skills before entering the job market, extending the course duration by around six weeks. Fees are ₹1.5 lakh for the online programs and ₹3.9 lakh for the offline campus programs. Kraftshala offers a placement guarantee, promising a fee refund to students who are not placed. The institute says it has placed around 1,000 students annually over the past three years. Online cohorts start every month while as offline batches, which started this May will be filled on quarterly basis. |
Now that a new campus has added an ambitious vertical and led to expansion of Kraftshala, going forward what is your thinking on future?
Basically we have to make sure we are massively upgrading our curriculums so that we are ready for this tsunami of AI. So I change my curriculum every month. So that is the first bit, that you have to make sure that you write the way fully so that the student who is putting that faith in you, that you will put my job, you know better, that faith is kind of staying strong. The second bit is that we have to exist in more formats and offline is part of that. More formats, more places that we want to sort of go to. And then the third part is domains. Not everybody wants to build a marketing career. Demand for jobs is going to be very high and will continue to be very high for years and decades so that somebody can build a full career and not something that is transient So that is where we are going after. So our goal is 20,000 placements a year. Looking ahead, we may also explore partnering with higher education institutions to help them strengthen employability outcomes, although that’s still at an early stage of discussion.
