Phalgun Kompalli is the Co-founder at upGrad, India’s largest higher education provider. Founded in early 2015, upGrad offers online programs for working professionals. In a short span of around 5 years, upGrad has impacted almost 0.9 million individuals globally.

Prior to upGrad, Phalgun was a Principal at The Parthenon Group, an education strategy-consulting firm, where he was involved in advising large education conglomerates and investment funds on their growth and investment strategy in education. Phalgun has done significant work in the field of higher education and technology-enabled learning across India, US, Brazil, Africa and South East Asia.

Prior to Parthenon, Phalgun worked at Opera Solutions, an analytics firm consulting Fortune 500 companies on their revenue & cost optimization initiatives through data analytics. Phalgun completed his Bachelor’s in Technology from IIT Delhi. 

In an interaction with People Matters, Phalgun Kompalli, Co-founder, upGrad shares his thoughts on the biggest shift of 2020, some remarkable changes upGrad had implemented and more. 

How has the year been for the e-learning industry in India? Being ranked #1 on LinkedIn Top Startups, how was it for upGrad?

Online education was on a rise even before the arrival of COVID19, and people were gradually shifting from traditional medium to hybrid medium. However, the strike of the pandemic has accelerated the adoption of e-learning and has dramatically changed the education landscape in India, as it has proved its robustness as compared to the offline institutes. Owing to its flexibility and feasibility, learners in the coming times would prefer to take up online programs from the comfort and safety of their houses. Also, as the trend continues, with more and more renowned universities adopting e-learning and investments reducing in infrastructure, the cost of education will substantially be reduced. We are enabling 100+ universities and colleges, which includes MHRD’s NIRF Top 100 universities, to seamlessly replicate their classes online, with over 1,00,000 learners logged in to the platform, as we speak.

Now addressing the second part of the question, today one cannot overemphasize the importance of skilling for mid-career professionals in an era where the half-life of knowledge is reducing more rapidly than ever. Owing to our outcome-oriented learning approach, we have been able to successfully translate consumer’s intent into revenue and have reported a 50% growth in our gross revenue in Q2, thus keeping the company on track for its forecasted INR 1200 crore annual run rate (we are considering Q1 April-May-June vs Q2 July-August-September for the below data).

While all verticals have grown in Q1 vs Q2, the Management vertical has grown by 81% in terms of revenue, making it the biggest winner. The vertical includes LL.M. in Corporate & Financial Law program, launched in the second half of 2020 with the renowned Jindal Global Law School, along with existing programs like PG Certification in Digital Marketing from MICA, & Product Management Certification from DukeCE. As the workforce switch gears towards digital literacy, our Machine Learning portfolio with PG Diploma and Master’s programs have been popular and has grown by 61% in terms of revenue. This includes programs with India’s renowned IIIT-B, and IIT-Madras along with the UK-based Liverpool John Moores University, (LJMU).

Also, as we talk about Q2, the growth has been multifaceted this quarter:

• 20 new programs were added in Q2 in the areas of Marketing, Finance, Operations, HR, Law, Strategy, and Leadership, Analytics, Big Data, IoT, Cyber Security, AI, and Data Science.
• Start date of programs, which used to be once a quarter till the last fiscal, had to be tripled this quarter to meet the growing demand.
• This has led to reaching a cumulative of 0.9 million learners, which will gain further momentum in the subsequent months.
• Career transition to other jobs for learners increased by 25 per cent in this quarter, which had previously contracted by 60 per cent compared to pre-covid levels.
• The upGrad team size grew four-fold from 500 to 2000 employees spread over 1000 cities.

While this year is massively hit by the pandemic, the work-life took a 360-degree shift, any major challenges that you had to face?

Keeping the overall safety and well-being of our workforce into place, we announced WFH even before the nationwide lockdown happened in India in March this year. However, before actioning, we pre-empted the need for a rounded approach to monitor and meet the psychosocial needs of our workforce, as we rightly expected most to move back to their hometowns. We were cognizant that missing the office environment and interpersonal interactions will have a huge interplay with the current state of living in joint families, with perhaps a lack of personal space, minimal physical & social activities, coupled with the anxiety of the pandemic. Thus, the holistic well-being of our employees, in addition to their physical safety, became the front and centre of our people's practices, and we tied up with an employee assistance partner. The partnership enabled our employees with over 1000 counsellors available 24x7 on online chat, voice calls or video sessions. 

Moreover, all our processes, policies, tools had to be evolved to provide clarity and direction to our employees in the new normal of ‘work from home’. While the workforce is delivering to the best of their ability, we ensured that they were equipped and enabled while at home. We have also improved the gamut of employee benefits by allowing COVID-19 leaves, add-on features in insurance policies, ex-gratia payouts to tide over dire medical emergencies, as well as invigorated remote employee engagement activities like fitness challenges, yoga classes, informal talk shows with senior leaders, and virtual stand-up comedies; what employees found most de-stressing is the one-on-one expert counselling sessions, where they opened up and uninhibitedly spoke about problems in relationship to self-improvement to sexual health concerns.

Our managers and leaders have to make a transition too, with managing teams and work completely remotely – we learned and unlearned a lot of our people management practices and continue to do so on an everyday basis. To be honest, we didn’t have any challenges in terms of business as our entire delivery system has always been online. 

Lastly, ensuring the overall safety of our workforce, we have now increased the WFH duration by 6 more months, which earlier was until the end of December this year.

If you were to throw some light on the learning and skilling trends for 2020, what will those be? Has COVID-19 changed people’s approach to reskilling? Please share your observations.

The arrival of COVID-19 has changed the age-old perception divide in the eyes of recruiters when it comes to hiring talent, thereby leading to the acceptance of online education.

The dated perception of offline learning being more credible is now changed, as the pandemic-induced situation has proved the robustness of the online model – for its feasibility and accessibility that it offers. The current workforce is looking at eLearning model as a viable proposition to avoid career redundancy and the situation is similar with the employers who are now hiring talent from an online batch, owing to their deep subject knowledge of future-forward skills. Also, the need for social distancing and enhanced safety requirements have led to increased digitization which in turn has led to online learning take a centre-stage. With technology taking over our ecosystem, we have seen the workforce rapidly switching gear towards digital literacy in the last few years. Thus, as we talk about the learning and skilling trends of 2020, the domain of Data Science is the most popular, followed by Digital Marketing. Areas of Machine learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) are also popular amidst our current workforce, as the in-demand jobs of today and the future require a fair amount of interaction with data and the skillset to work in a digital ecosystem. The digital macro-trend, coupled with an increase in usage of data, is going to now drive the workplace ecosystem.

upGrad has always been at the forefront for imparting quality higher education that offers accurate domain knowledge and technology-driven skill sets to our learners. Our thoughtfully curated programs and more than 38,000 paid users so far, bears the testimony, indeed.

We operate in times when industry is evolving at a rapid pace and professionals need to have a thorough knowledge of future-forward skills and its applications, which in turn shall help them survive the career redundancy. upGrad with its ability to provide meaningful career outcomes to its learners is leading the higher edtech sector in India.

What are some of the learning & skilling trends that people leaders need to watch out for in 2021?

People leaders have been pursuing an innovation-driven work environment that could help employees to reskill, upskill, innovate, and remain significant. With online getting its due recognition and acceptance, we have a new wave of hiring set in and shall continue to grow. Amid the pandemic-stricken situation, when several companies have closed doors to hire, we at upGrad have enabled over 1000 job transitions, thereby placing our learners in NPCI (National Payments Corporation of India), Flipkart, Amazon, HDFC Life, Naukri & others.

We operate in times when the new business circumstances around the world have created a range of new jobs that require digital skills, which have made 2020 the tech-dominated year. This trend is set to continue and build a bigger marketplace for leaders and professionals in 2021, thereby creating a massive demand-supply situation. Small and large corporates will be on the lookout for employees who can fit into niche portfolios within the organization and are domain-experts rather than plain vanilla industry professionals. Freshers as well as the seasoned professionals, who are looking for jobs will have to rely on more than just a formal education to be able to be relevant. Therefore, companies like upGrad have been constantly working on revolutionizing the program content and delivery system, in order to bring quality online upskilling solutions to individuals in India and beyond, which in turn, shall help them with desired career outcomes. 

2021 will be another year of innovation and shifts. Anything in particular are you looking forward to? Please share your thoughts.

Building a truly world-class experience for the learners. At the cost of sounding repetitive & cliched, I will reiterate that this is the goal of upGrad - building a world-class platform that drives personalized learning experience & personalized career outcomes at scale. Because, no one else in the world has done this level of personalization that we at upGrad are gunning for.

When online learning has become the mainstream and as a response to the pandemic, even offline institutions are accepting the hybrid learning model. The game-changer will be technology. The platform driving the most brilliant user experience & outcome will win the market globally. We started with a core audience of working professionals. However, we are now expanding and moving towards the degree market and will be readying products that can cater to a massier audience. We currently have an Android SuperApp that is offering a wide range of free courses to enable learners with our online learning experience. Soon we aim to add advanced and personalized features on careers that will help them get more concentrated job recommendations basis their career aspirations. The technology will enable the global workforce with a more personalized career experience.

We are actively looking at bringing the best-in-class national and international university tie-ups for our learners, to enable them with new-age subject knowledge and skillsets. In parallel, this year, we also look at opening non-linear business growth avenues, which will involve a few strategic mergers & acquisitions that shall, in turn, support our exponential growth track record in the coming quarters.