Daybreak - Scaler wanted to do for tech education what Masters' Union did for the MBA. AI had other plans

Episode Date: April 15, 2025

Back in 2019, an ed-tech called Scaler Academy decided to do for tech education what Masters’ Union did for the traditional MBA. The tech-upskilling platform launched in 2019 with a simple pitch: take AI, machine learning, and data science courses, get placed at top tech firms, and make a lot more money. But five years later, that formula is breaking down. The very thing Scaler trained people in—AI—is making it redundant. Tune in. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.The Ken is hosting a subscriber event! Join Two by Two hosts Rohin Dharmakumar and Praveen Gopal Krishnan and three distinguished guests as they discuss broken career ladders, shortening career spans, and collapsing organisational structures. Buy tickets here. 

Hi, this is Rohan Dharma Kumar. If you've heard any of the Ken's podcasts, you've probably heard me, my interruptions, my analogies, and my contrarian takes on most topics. And you might rightly be wondering why am I interrupting this episode too. It's for a special announcement. For the last few months, I and Sita Raman Ganesh, my colleague and the Ken's deputy editor, have been working on an ambitious new podcast. It's called Intermission.

We want to tell the secret sauce stories of India's greatest companies. Stories of how they were born, how they fought to survive, how they build their organizations and culture, how they manage to innovate and thrive over decades, and most importantly, how they're poised today. To do that, Sita and I have been reading books, poring over reports, going through financial statements, digging up archives, and talking to dozens of people. And if that wasn't enough, we also decided to throw in video into the mix. Yes, you heard that right. Intermission has also had to find its footing in the world of multi-camera shoots in professional studios, laborious editing, and extensive post-production. Sita and I are still reeling from the intensity of our first studio recording.

Intermission launches on March 23rd. To get alert, as soon as we release our first video. episode, please follow intermission on Spotify and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the Ken's YouTube channel. You can find all of the links at the ken.com slash I am. With that, back to your episode. Back in 2019, an ed tech called Scalar decided to do for tech education what Masters Union had done for the traditional MBA. They actually started as an interview prep company, So they helped whoever wanted to sort of crack Amazon interviews or Google interviews or even interviews based on Python and the rest of the programming languages. So that's how they began.

That's my colleague, Atul Krishna. He covers education and ed techs for the ken. Now, Atul says that engineering graduates could not get enough of this particular ed tech. Especially after Scalar realized it needed to teach engineering students more than, just how to sound smart at interviews. It started offering them specialized AI courses. In 2019, they made a slight shift towards being this upskilling platform.

So they started as this certification platform that gives software development programs, such as full stack. And the idea was that since they were already a interview prep company, so they could leverage that experience as well as the experience that they have as an upskilling platform. Scalar's pitch to students was simple.

Take AI, machine learning and data science courses with us, get placed at top firms and make a lot more money. It was positioning itself as a more hands-on alternative to your traditional tech education. It was a big promise, but it's one that Scalar was able to honour. Well, at least for a little while. With its first batch, the ed tech managed to place every single one of its 83 students. It also managed to more than double their average annual salary to around 15 lakh rupees.

But five years have passed since then and something has changed. Atul spoke to multiple people who had signed up for Scalor's courses to understand how it played out for them. One of them was Nikhil. He took a full stack course because he did his engineering from a tight school. three college and he then took a computer goes from whatever academy that was there. And that helped him land a job at one of the major tech firms in India. Although it's just, I think, 3.6 lakh versus a per annum salary. So he was trying to upscale.

So he already has this experience of, you know, getting a certificate that helped him get a job. So he thought, oh, something like scalar would help him do it better. and he was aiming for like a 10 LPA salary or something. And it was even promised to him when he spoke with one of the one of their marketers even. Nikhil had all his hopes pinned on Scalar. He even took out a 3.5 lakh rupee loan for the cause.

That was his entire annual salary at the time. But unfortunately, things didn't quite work out the way he had hoped. He couldn't get any job interviews. He didn't get any job interviews. He didn't get any call. even though he applied for multiple places and even used Scalar's assistance, there was no callback. And that is true for many of the students who took it. The glory days of Scalar seemed to be coming to an end. This is a company that rode the

post-pandemic IT boom on the back of its AI courses. It saw a 6x increase in operating revenue between 2022 and 2024. But now, the tide is turning. And the very thing that put Scalar on the map is quickly becoming its biggest competitor. Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host Rahil Filippos and I don't chase the news cycle. Instead, every day of the week, my colleagues, Nika and I come to you with one business story that is worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Tuesday, the 15th of April.

When you look at the evolution of Scalar from way back in 2014 when it was helping students tackle placement interviews to 2019, when it got into tech upscal. It immediately becomes clear that its two co-founders, Abhimanyu Saxena and Anshuman Singh, were trying to plug what they saw as massive gaps in the education system. So even when Anshuman and Abymanyu worked, so they worked for tech companies in the US, Abimanyu worked for Fab.com and Anshuman reported directly to Mark Zuckerberg when it was called Facebook. So even then they had realized that there was this gap between freshers that was. coming in and the amount of employable freshers there are because what academy are teachers

might lag behind what the industry is using right now. So they realized this gap. So after they started interview bit in 2019, they decided that, okay, let's start scalar and sort of try to bridge this gap. So this gap exists, especially in India, it definitely exists. The recent economic survey found that a large portion of the graduates are not. employable. So there is a gap that it exists because the industry the academia is usually too theoretical even though they are trying to change it's not keeping pace

with the technological changes which happens almost they're weak right? Right so scalers promise was kind of to help you be ahead of the curve almost right? Right yes so the scalers promise was to address this particular gap so yes Yes, when you go to college, you get a degree, you have your connections, you learn theoretically about the subject. But it's not necessary that every college in India, even the IITs to some extent, that they know what the industry is currently using, what software they're using. And what kind of software they're getting into. So how they are using AI, stuff like that. So Scalar as a company sort of acts as a bridge where they know what is being taught.

But they also hold regular meetings with industry people. They try to understand. Industry people come and teach through Scalar. So they ensure that whatever knowledge that the students have, it's relevant. When Atul spoke to Saxena about a month ago, he admitted that they also got a bit lucky with their timing. Meaning that just nine months after Scalar was founded when the pandemic prompted homebound candidates to want to upskill themselves,

the company was there, ready and waiting with its courses. This combined with the EdTech's dedicated placement support meant that it reaped huge benefits. Its homepage at the time was plastered with success stories of students getting 100, even 200% hikes during the post-pandemic IT boom. Right, Atul, can you tell me about some of the courses that Scalar was offering at the time? Right, so Scalar offered software development courses like Fullstack and then they introduced courses in AI and machine learning.

And so these are specific courses that are focused on what the industry is focusing on right now. And their idea is to certify them in these courses and then help them get the job in these big companies. The thing is, since 2019, the hiring landscape has changed completely, particularly when it comes to entry-level software jobs. And you all know the reason for this change. It's AI, artificial intelligence. It can do the same jobs faster, cheaper, and like Artil put it, without any lunch breaks. Hi, I'm briefly interrupting this episode to tell you about the Ken's next live event.

We were just talking about a startup that made a name for itself by promising professionals a better shot at landing their dream jobs. But I want to shift the focus for a second to the people actually signing up for courses like these. Ambitious, hopeful, mostly young professionals, fighting for a shot at a better job and a more successful career in particularly trying times. You see, the 40-year career that professionals took for granted as they entered their first jobs is crumbling. Even a 10-year career arc is getting hard to predict and plan for. Roals are getting eliminated, hierarchy is flattened, work is getting automated,

with AI. So how can professionals across ages, industries and levels of experience plan ahead in such an environment? Well, we are hoping to answer just that at the Ken's live event in Bangalore on the 21st of April. Two-by-two hosts Rohin Dharmakumar and Praveen Gopal-Krishnan will be joined by three distinguished guests. Harshal Mathur, co-founder and CEO of Razorpea, Vasota Agarwal, chief business officer at InMobi and Professor Sauram Mukharji of IIMO.

Bangal. Join them as they discuss how we should rethink careers for a new age of rapid change, innovation and uncertainty. Details about the event and a link to purchase tickets will be in the show notes of this episode. Although they are really in tune with what the industry is doing, the thing is, when I spoke to a few software developers, what they do is they rely on a lot of co-pilots and they try to learn on their own. Now, this is not something a beginner software developer.

can do. This is something an experience software developer is able to do. So, which means that people like them are able to rely on the copilot itself and their base knowledge that they already have to learn new things like a software developer I spoke to. He said he learned AWS just by working with copilot. Now, it's not possible for a beginner software developer, but it just mean that there is, AI is becoming a tutor in a way and it is in a way taking scalers job. So now it's not currently at a place where beginners can also trust it, but the fact that it is evolving is the crisis that we are talking about. It's not that human expertise is completely irrelevant now. Just take for instance a personalized recommendation algorithm. That's the sort of thing

that decides which products a website like Amazon should convince users to buy next. Now, that is something that AI can't fully handle yet and would still require ML engineers and data scientists to take care of. But for simpler coding work, the kind that entry-level engineers would handle, AI is already winning. And that's not all. The industry on the whole has been facing global headwinds. Hundreds of tech companies across the world have let go of well over 150,000 employees in 2024 alone. To be fair to Scalar, there's only so much you can do

when the job market is the way that it is. Right, so how is Scalar kind of addressing this crisis, Satul? Right. So the issue with AI being competition is on two levels. One level is that it is directly affecting student placements, scalers placements, where a student who will get into an entry-level job, the nature of the job has changed.

The bar is much higher now because what was earlier an entry-level software developer's job is now being done by AI. It's not being done like 100% but it's being done enough that an experienced developer would take half the time

than what he would do. So the other aspect is that Scalar is trying to address this by incorporating more AI into their own modules. So for all of the courses that they teach, they now have a co-pilot assistant, which helps them sort of learn by talking to it.

It helps them summarize. It helps them with examples and all of that. And the other thing is using AI as a tool has been incorporated into the modules itself. So now when you, Now when you learn a scalar, when you get a Scalar certificate, the modules in it also involves how to use the AI to get the job done faster, which was not the case earlier.

So their way of going about it is introducing more AI and seeing AI as a tool rather than a competitor and make sure that the students that are coming into Scalar are learning how to use the AI as well. So Scalers new game plan is simple. Don't fight AI. Fold it into the business. Saxena is optimistic, but so is the broader upscaling industry. In fact, it has a well-worn analogy for what's happening.

They are comparing this phase to the industrial revolution. Yes, jobs are being lost, but in the long run, the industry will grow five to ten times is what some of them believe. And with that will come an explosion of jobs. Now, at least Scala has one stat working in its favor. A study by online news outlet inside higher education found that only 4% of candidates complete free online courses. For Scalar, Saxena claims the completion rate is above 95%. But for someone like Nikhil, none of that matters. Because the bottom line is no job offer, no return on investment.

Before I sign off, I have a question for you. Have you signed up for upscaling courses in the past? And has it actually helped you in your career? Let me know. You can share your response with me on WhatsApp. The number is 8971-08379. I will add it to the show notes of this episode. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken,

India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of our subscriber-only offerings. A full subscription unlocks daily long-form feature stories newsletters and podcast extras. Head to the ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the website. Today's episode was hosted by Rahil Filippos and edited by Rajiv Sien.