How is SpeakIn using AI-enabled network of speakers and experts to help organisational learning?

People skills need upgrading. Cost pressures drive organizations to want standard digital learning in the local language. Moreover, if the content is low-quality and/or irrelevant, it drives away the attention span. Thus, SpeakIn content with real life examples and the e-learning platform for businesses, leaders and their teams has helped the short learning formats.

In conversation with CiOL, SpeakIn's founder Deepshikha Kumar Anand drafts the journey of the startup. Here is their success story transforming lives with short story content.

SpeakIn founder Deepshikha Kumar Anand

The Customer

India is home to one of the largest populations of working professionals. We are indeed tapping this demography. Professionals across all scales of businesses and industries, and from all parts of the country form our customer base.

The Challenge

The biggest challenge is the ever-widening skill gap. Developments in the world are at an unprecedented pace and in such a scenario, the existing knowledge becomes outdated and redundant before you know it. To be market-ready and be present at the top of the skill pool, there is a constant need to upskill. This could be in the form of learning new tools for marketing, learning to operate new machines, learning effective ways of communication, or learning to work remotely in a completely automated infrastructure.

The organizational L&D programs are often not enough to fill this gap because of the lack of curation and the quality of content. Moreover, the situation becomes even worse in tier 2 and 3 cities where instructions in English have proven to be largely ineffective. There is an army of qualified people (including graduates and post-graduates) who are unable to land the desired jobs because of the skill gap.

The Solution

Acknowledging the numerous challenges, SpeakIn set out to solve the problem of the widening skill gap. Our focus was on addressing the core issues of curated sessions, high-quality content and delivery in the language of choice. Over the years, SpeakIn has built a network of experts from all walks of life.

Currently 17,000 strong, the SpeakIn network comprises some of the finest industry leaders from around the world. We take pride in delivering the highest quality content from these credible experts. Moreover, our team has always followed rigorous research practices to understand the need and pain-points of the customer. This research helps us in curating the delivery experiences for the customer that best suit their needs. And lastly, SpeakIn has launched vernacular courses. We're ensuring that learning doesn't have to stop because of language barriers.

 The Theme

SpeakIn is India's largest network of experts. Our network comprises of - business leaders, entrepreneurs, politicians, bureaucrats, academicians and many more. Backed by the strong network, we have always been well equipped in terms of bringing the who's who of the industry for knowledge-based forums for our customers. We also have a fantastic team who is empathetic, considerate and extremely intelligent.

Each member of the team performs the role of a consultant during his/her client interactions - understanding the problems and working them out. We can see the challenges that many times our customers don't themselves realize, and hence can offer the best solutions.

 The Implementation

SpeakIn, being the go-to name for events and conferences, was the first-in-line among the sectors that got affected by COVID. We quickly recognized two major trends that were gaining traction - live virtual sessions and e-learning content and being an agile organisation brought in two major products.

SpeakIn brought our customized series of live learning sessions by our top experts. It also has self-paced learning content on its e-learning platform, Nimble. Both these offerings became an instant hit among SpeakIn's clientele and acted as proof that agility and persistence can turn any adversity to opportunity.

Results

India is a land of opportunities - you just need to enter the market with the relevant product. We originally entered the market with the intent of bridging the knowledge gap (insights on industry, market, product etc) that many organizations aspire for. In the process, we realized an existing issue - the issue of skill gap.

We already had the resources to address this problem and we didn't think twice. Given the extreme competition in terms of gaining employment, we are today trying to ease the pressure on employability. An unplanned opportunity came to us in the form of the COVID19 pandemic. Many people during the current times are looking for avenues to upskill themselves to ensure that when the pandemic ends, they are market-ready. We are proud to be helping such professionals realize their dreams.