Decision Factor

During April 2022, Kiran from DTRI called upon us (Geethesh and Narayanaswamy) and put forth his idea of starting an embedded design course for students of rural engineering colleges. Also, as a startup entrepreneur, with 15+ years of solid industrial experience in multinational giants like Qualcom and Intel he was upbeat in contributing to society by means of upskilling the rural talents.

Since myself and Narayan started our entrepreneurship journey in 2012 in similar training venture called Mysore Embedded Technology Institute where we even delivered our training at NIT Nagaland, Ganpath university, Ahmedabad, Agra, Sholapur apart from most of the Engineering colleges in and around Mysore including Rural engineering colleges before pivoting to an IoT product and services company. With this experience, before restarting the training we had a few questions for Kiran and I am recording whatever I remember here.

G&N:  who will pay for expenses? Let’s forget the profit for this moment.

Kiran: We will get it from the companies who hire them.

G&N: That amount we will get after we successfully place them, till then who will bear the expenses?

Kiran: I will take care of that

G&N: The cost centers for this venture will be Subject Matter Expert( SME ) charges, Assistant trainers charges, Rent for the place that can accommodate at least 20,  Microcontroller training board & accessories charges, basic amenities like water, EB charges, marketing visit charges, Selection test material preparation and printing charges, Selection process visit charges, course material preparation and print charges, administrative and miscellaneous charges and this would come up to ~3 Lakh per month. At present we can defer our SME charges, but still you would be requiring a minimum of ~100,000/- per month.

Kiran: Ok I am ready to bear it.

G&N: From my previous experience, in seminars conducted in rural engineering colleges, I used to get more questions but with all due respect, training rural engineering students will be a herculean task because of language, cultural and knowledge barriers.

Kiran: Since the admission for the colleges are through CET exams, there also we can find good talents who are still trainable. We will select for this training by doing our own test.

G&N: We will take up training delivery but who will work towards placing them so that we will get back our deferred investment. 

Kiran: I will take that responsibility 

G&N: There is already some news about recession going around, what if we are not able to place all of them if hiring freezes.

Kiran: We have to take the risk and I am ready for it

Appreciating his enterprising qualities and his courage to put skin in the game, we jumped in for an association.

Journey Begins

Next step, Kiran started charting plans to approach the colleges, scheduling our presentation, conducting entrance tests for students for the course and our enrollment yatra started. We visited govt engineering colleges starting from Chamarajanagar, KR Pet, Virajpet, Haveri and private colleges like Bahubali College of Engineering, Shravanabelagola and GSSS women's engineering college, Mysore. This Yatra happened from May to July 2022 .The selection process involved a written test with C language + electronics timed  MCQ’s followed by personal interview and listing for selection, all these to happen when we visit the campus. In a nutshell, we conducted written tests for around  250+, one on one interviews for 60+ and selected 23 candidates for a free embedded design skill development program.

Start of Upskilling Program

From Aug 22 the training program on “Embedded Systems Design” started for the first batch of 23 hand picked engineers from five rural engineering colleges and out of it two were from women’s college. 

The training program was done in collaboration of three entities DTRI front ending the entire training & placement effort, METI delivering the training and SJCE STEP providing space and facilities to conduct the training in SJCE campus.

The training was delivered free of cost and as a prior information and agreement. Students arranged for their stay and food on their own. We knew that for some of them it was a financial burden but that’s the best we could do with our financial condition. 

As announced earlier the training was very regimental in nature and there was a final round of selection after three weeks. Only 17 could make it to the final round of selection. From Monday to Saturday ,full day training with lunch and tea breaks. 

The regimental training pattern was like this

• C programming
• Electronics basics
• Embedded programming
• Daily assignments to do after they go back home
• Soft Skills like communication etiquettes (both verbal and written)
• Weekly mock interviews
• Daily online tests
• Weekly Tests
• Exposure to corporate systems

English & Confidence

With all these we found that due to their background they were struggling to speak in English and their confidence used to go down even if they knew the concept and answer. Then based on feedback and assessment  we arranged a spoken English course from a reputable professional and in the next three weeks we noticed a wonderful change happening with them in their confidence level.

Hiring Client

Meanwhile, within a few weeks of closure of this program, A reputed automotive specialized services company from Bangalore, showed its interest in taking up trained engineers and wanted to introduce automotive concepts as a part of the course. Along with embedded training there was additional training in a week and tests, assignments were conducted including new topics.

Additional Concepts & Scholarship

Post completion of automotive training, conducted one special test on automotive lessons and hiring client announced a scholarship to the students who qualified their tests. In that process few of the students got qualified and started getting paid.

This was a confidence changing point for our team also about the incremental learning appetite the students had developed over the last few weeks. In the beginning students were complaining about shortage of time with loads of assignments in the designed topics, everyone was stressed out and as weeks passed by, as a normal human behavior they started to acclimatize to the new learning environment and by the course coming to an end, even when unplanned subjects were introduced, I will not tell that they aligned very fast rather I would put it as the latency to adapt and learn was quite short.

Skills learnt and 100% Placement

By  end of the program, the students were empowered with following skills : In the technical gambit, C Programming, Embedded C programming,  Electronic circuit reading and analysis, PCB study, Electronic component data sheet interpretation, Automotive concepts . In the soft skills gambit each of them climbed one or two steps in English communication (both spoken and written), confidence level, interpersonal skills, responsibility, persuasion, collaboration, diligence, time management etc.

By the end of the program, our client put up an offer to hire all of the 17 who successfully completed the course. Our first journey towards a noble cause can be summarized pictorially as depicted below.