On February 3, Bengaluru headquartered Centre for Teacher Accreditation (CENTA), a platform to assess and certify teachers’ competencies and connect teachers to opportunities and support their upskilling, announced that they are now India’s largest teacher community with 6,00,000 active teachers using the platform. With edtech driving the current boom in the technology sector, there is an immediate need for high-quality teachers to lead, guide, facilitate and mentor this growth. 

CENTA is witnessing a constant stream of requests from the edtech world for high-quality full-time teachers, part-time tutors, and teacher-preneurs who will run franchises of various ed-techs. Schools are not far behind – there is increasing willingness to bring onboard expert teachers to run specific sessions or clear doubts without being on the rolls.

Addressing the need for high-quality teachers, CENTA offers certifications that assess teachers’ competencies and is helping to bridge the gap between motivated teachers and better opportunities – preference in private school recruitment, creation of resource person pools in governments, supplemental earnings and so on. Its growing roster of committed teachers has increased to 6,00,000 spread across India and 40,000 across the Philippines, Nigeria, Bangladesh, UAE, and the UK.

CENTA has the potential to add $2 billion to the economy by solving one of the biggest problems in the sector – consistent, high-quality teacher supply. It plans to continue its rapid growth rate and has projections to be at least a 2 million teacher community in 2022. Being the creators of market-based teacher certification, CENTA has empowered thousands of teachers across nations with better career progression through CENTA Standards, a well-defined and globally benchmarked competency framework. 

“Through 2021, CENTA has been actively integrating itself into the daily professional life of a teacher through the synergy and the intervention of technology. Quality education, including edtech, is critical for placing India on the world map of developed economies, and CENTA is an important partner in bringing that about through its community of certified teachers,” says Ramya Venkataraman, founder-CEO of CENTA who is also supporting the development of India’s National Professional Standards for Teachers through her role in the NCTE committee now. 

“As we look towards the journey of this year, we can’t help but feel extremely optimistic about the potential of CENTA. We have been able to build a world-class platform for technology-driven teacher certification so that quality teachers can have access to opportunities and affordable professional development. Also, as proposed in the Union Budget, the PM eVIDYA scheme of ‘one class, one TV programme’ is an interesting initiative to deliver educational programming through various mediums. High-quality content and teacher support for doubt-clearing are important elements of implementing something like this. We are working on such elements with a State Government and exploring mechanisms like missed calls, answering questions through SMS, etc., to make such programmes interactive and impactful,” she adds. 

CENTA has developed a well-defined and globally benchmarked competency framework for teachers within the platform and is massively outreaching prospects in India, simultaneously increasing its presence in the Middle East, Africa, South East Asia, and the UK. 

Founded in 2014, CENTA is a teacher certification company catering to the entire professional life-cycle of the teacher – certification, career growth, professional development, and recruitment. It currently serves a rapidly growing community of 6,00,000 teachers, 11,000 school leaders, and promoters from 6000+ locations across the world.