Tell us about your journey (personal & professional), when you started your journey in this education industry, how it is going and what is your future plan.
I personally feel obligated to the education sector. Starting from a very modest background, it has purely been the power of good learning that has helped me transform my life completely. I strongly believe that education is the only sector in the world that has the power to significantly
transform the lives of every individual – from where they start to where they end. I am an example of that.
This personal motivation has led me to go back and forth with education multiple times in the last decade and a half. When I was 18, I used to teach Maths at a coaching institute, preparing children for the coveted IIT entrance exam.
I later worked with Teach for India in Mumbai, India and as a trainer for fresh hires in Schlumberger’s Middle East and Asia Learning Center in Abu Dhabi, UAE. I even worked with an edtech in Shanghai, China and at Harvard, I was a faculty-nominated tutor for a couple of core subjects – Finance and Operations.
Today, I run Early Steps Academy – a global education program to upskill school children on modern, essential subjects and 21st century skills. The mission of Early Steps Academy is to revolutionise education by making learning relevant (useful) and engaging (fun!) for the 2 Billion school going children worldwide.
Share an insight, into any challenges you faced while running your organization. What Inspired you to get into this industry?
One of the biggest challenges in building Early Steps Academy is to build a global company from Day 1. While it is in the interest of the learner to have a global community of peers and to be able to start on the journey of becoming a “global citizen” from a very young age, it is operationally
cumbersome to manage business across 50 countries. From language and cultural nuances, varying currency and communication methods to training a team to handle global customer
needs has been both exciting and challenging. However, the ability to solve something at such
a large scale is nothing less than thrilling – just like other global brands such as Uber, Google or
Netflix have it for the world!
Being an educational leader, what message would you like to give? Your motivational mantra?
As an educational leader, my definition of education is not limited to the walls of a school or
the pages of a book. Learning and education can be as expansive as one wants and the “willingness to learn” is in itself the sole skill one needs in life in order to succeed.
As humans, our ability to build such a beautiful world around us – buildings to technology to
space science – is driven by our curiosity and confidence. Man’s interest (curiosity) in knowing
what’s happening in distant lands and outer space, and the confidence to actually step out of comfort zones are what led to explorations and discoveries, taking mankind forward. I believe,
for humans to survive and thrive in the decades and centuries to come, in the face of its own
innovations and technological advancements, the basic skills of curiosity and confidence are to
be protected (and nurtured).
During the Pandemic every industry had challenges. What challenges you faced and how you overcame them?
While pandemic highlighted new challenges in the education sector, it also presented itself as an opportunity to many as scaling up online education was simpler in many ways than to scale up capex-heavy offline business.
However, education is not just about moving between offline and online. It is much more
nuanced than that and each method has its own benefits to the learner. As a global program,
Early Steps Academy has always been online as it enables global learning experiences to children at affordable prices.
What according to you, what is the advancement in this industry in terms of technology? Do you think your adoption of such advanced technologies has brought you to this elite position?
Technology has made learning more accessible for sure. At Early Steps Academy, it is the power of technology that enables us to create global classrooms, connecting children from different parts of the world to learn with and from each other seamlessly. Apart from the actual execution, at Early Steps, our AI-power feedback system (steps.ai) enables more nuanced performance mapping, better and faster feedback loops as well as more accurate progress tracking, giving educators the power to deliver personalised learning experience to each child.
