Although more than 1.5 million students pursue post-secondary engineering courses every year in India, according to the Ministry of Human Rights, almost half (48%) of engineers are unemployed. One reason, based on a study by job assessment firm Aspiring Minds, is that 95% of engineers in India were not qualified for the job despite having a college education.
This is because engineers require advanced technology and programming skills, typical of a computer engineering program, to meet the prerequisites for many of today's jobs. It's also because engineers require communication, leadership, and team-building skills that aren't typically taught in engineering classes.
Unfortunately, this means that most engineers are working in jobs that they are overqualified for, simply because they lack certain skills.
Ayush Jaiswal (23) recognized this in his first year of engineering at college, but ended up dropping out. He was inspired by Apple's late Steve Jobs (who also never graduated from college) to move to Silicon Valley and start his own company.
Jaiswal already had an idea in mind for his career and wanted to develop a networking platform to help investors find, invest in and collaborate with promising new startups. One skill that engineers typically never learned was networking and he planned to solve that with the start of Dealflow. Unfortunately, the company never took off. Jaiswal believes the reason for this was timing, given the economy, bad investments and the presence of players like Tracxn and LetsVenture in the market (who are venture capitalists who support new companies in India).
Jaiswal refused to give up, however. About a dozen failed products and startups later, he met Andrew Linfoot (26) at a co-working space in Delhi. Together, the two formed Pesto Technology which operates a 12-week boot camp that teaches soft skills to software engineers by connecting them with mentors across the US. Soft skills include communication, problem-solving, and interpersonal skills that support the business side of a career.
“We wanted an easy name for our company that everyone around the world could agree on,” shares Jaiswal. “We initially thought about Pencil Tech, but the domain was already registered, so we opted for Pesto Tech.”
Essentially, Pesto Tech acts as a mentor-based career accelerator. See how it works:
- Software engineers with at least two years of experience apply online.
- Successful candidates go through several rounds of cultural conversations, technical rounds, questionnaires and an exclusion round before their application is accepted.
- Mentors – which include individuals who have worked at large organizations like Twitter, Facebook, Uber and others – volunteer to support new engineers in learning new skills.
- During a typical three-month program with Pesto, students are guided by a mentor once a week via video conference.
“Pesto (goes) a long way in addressing the engineer competency gap created by Tier II and III engineering institutes, including what global product improvement or R&D companies need,” says Vinod Sood, MD, Hughes Systique India. He is Jaiswal's mentor. “As the economy grows, the future of work will be about enabling talent from anywhere to participate. Pesto is helping young talent from tier III cities and remote areas to get a platform where their skills and competencies can be enhanced.”
According to Sood, this innovative concept will provide more skilled and multi-talented software engineers.
Ayush and Linfoot are members of several technology communities in the US and this is where they meet potential new mentors. “When these mentors realize the influence that an hour off a week has on these engineers, they are excited to work with us – even without any compensation,” says Jaiswal.
But it was not always so. At first, people assumed the organization was a scam. “This made it difficult to choose the first batch of students,” says Jaiswal. Pesto's first group had just four participants, two of whom found successful jobs in the US.
Today is a different story. Dealing with the sheer volume of applications they receive is overwhelming. “As a startup, we can only support and train around 25 people per (session),” he says. “We are currently working on building software tools to automate the candidate selection process.”
Believe it or not, the initial coaching fee is free. However, before entering the program, students must sign a “profit sharing” agreement. Since trained software engineers earn more than Rs15 lakh per year in a full-time job at an international technology company, they must pay for training. This amounts to 17% of your annual income over the next three years.
If students do not earn more than Rs 15 lakh per year, the training will remain free.
“The limits of our business model depend almost entirely on the nature of our program. We value each revenue sharing agreement at $30,000. Our initial costs come down as we scale up,” says Jaiswal.
In addition to offering a curriculum that teaches software development, Pesto also focuses on bridging cultural differences. The idea is to provide interpersonal skills that can promote an international working relationship.
Linfoot, who now also works in Silicon Valley, credits learning soft skills for helping advance his career as a computer coding specialist. “The technical lectures helped me to be on par with my foreign colleagues,” he says.
Pesto is currently a team of five. In addition to Jaiswal and Linfoot, it includes Nimish Gupta (23), who was Pesto's first signing. Arfat Salman is the director of education and Shubham is the head of admissions. So far the team is doing well.
“We ended up making about $350,000, which gave us breathing room,” Jaiswal said. Initially, he completed a four-month consulting project to accumulate enough resources to invest in Pesto. Pesto charges a management fee of around $500 to its hiring partners to assign the position and manage the resume.
While mentors are all volunteers, code reviewers are paid by customers. Pesto's hiring partners include Vaynermedia, Mimir HQ, Fossa.io, Scale API, Embibe, and Zinc.io.
“We are focusing on increasing batch frequency and automating most elements of the business by building internal tools,” says Jaiswal. Pesto is expected to start new programs every month, with the capacity to train 25 students per class.