TMI e2E Academy, a training and placement firm, has developed some new approaches to skills development.
Unlike most skills development outfits which train the candidates first and then try to place them in a job, TMI?s is demand-driven approach. It first finds a job and then train a suitable candidate on and off the job. For this, it works with the employers. When most institutes look to government departments or job-seekers for their revenue, TMI taps employers for its revenue. It calls this model JOJOE?jointly-owned job-oriented education. What this means is that the employer pays TMI for hiring and training a candidate. ?If the employer pays for hiring, he?s more involved, and the attrition rate is low?, says T Muralidharan, chairman of the TMI group.
His point is that while the government spends huge money on skills development, the employer, the real beneficiary, pays very little. ?We?re the only company which tells the employer to pay for the entire process?, asserts Muralidharan, who is a chemical engineer from IIT Chennai and MBA from IIM-Ahmedabad. ?There is no wastage of training in our model?, he adds.
The JOJOE model has perhaps been a natural progression for the 22-year-old TMI group, which has primarily been into placement and other HR services. Almost 95% of the group revenues comes from employers, while it also renders fee-based services to job-seekers, especially in preparing for bank tests. TMI e2E Academy, a partner company of the National Skill Development Corporation, was started in March 2011, and by April this year, it has trained and placed more than 8,500 candidates.
The Hyderabad-headquartered company has embarked on two new initiatives to vastly expand its activities and meet its target of training and placing 5.2 lakh graduates in the next ten years.
The first is to train rural youth in a mission mode. For this, TMI has launched a joint initiative with the Confederation of NGOs of Rural India (CNRI) called Nirmaan. CNRI has about 7,000 NGOs under its network. Under the Nirmaan plan, TMI will share job requirements with the NGOs, who in turn will identify eligible candidates. TMI will interview the candidates and shortlist them for the employer, and later train them.
The second is an initiative called Job Dialogue, which basically is a mobile-based platform for job-seekers and job-givers to come together. This voice-based service is developed to reach out to rural candidates, who usually do not have a computer at home. A candidate can speak about his qualifications on his mobile to call centre, which will record him. Similarly, an employer can also inform the call centre about its job openings. TMI will subsequently interview and place the candidate. ?The idea is to reduce the cost of hiring? says Muralidharan. The company is in talks with telephone companies to create awareness about the programme through SMS. This project, to run on a pilot basis in Andhra Pradesh, will be launched nationally next year. Job Dialogue, Muralidharan believes, will generate vast data on job demand?and in turn skill requirements?in the SME space nationally. No such data is available now.
The two new initiatives, Muralidharan believes,will significantly scale up TMI?s operations and make it the largest player in the graduate employment space.