Raina: ambitious future plans

Edupreneur Shveta Raina is the Mumbai-based founder-CEO of Advantage Leadership Solutions Pvt. Ltd, which owns Talerang, a proprietary career training brand and platform that is the combination of two words — Talent, and Boomerang. Talerang offers school students, college graduates and professionals well-designed short duration and long-term programmes to make them work-ready.

The company’s 250-strong team includes several highly qualified mentors who develop students’ professional competencies and workplace skills, by way of assessment, training, internships, career guidance and mentorship. Thus far, the company has reached 30 million students in India, preparing them for industry workplaces through partnerships with colleges, corporates, media, and the United Nations Development Program.

Newspeg. In association with chosen corporate partners, Talerang launched its Career Track Simulation programme last month (January). It will provide students in the 12-25 years age group practical experience of working in corporate enterprises. After candidates successfully complete a month-long programme, they will become better aware of which career is right for them, says Raina. They will also be certified by the partner company and Talerang.

History. A highly qualified applied mathematics, international studies and economics graduate of America’s high-ranked Brown University, Raina acquired valuable corporate experience with Goldman Sachs and McKinsey & Co, New York before returning to India in 2009 for a two-year stint as director of the widely acclaimed Teach for India program. To add theory to practice in 2011, she signed up for the MBA degree programme of the top-ranked Harvard Business School, USA.

Direct talk. “During my two-years at Teach for India, I interacted with thousands of students and discerned a deep disconnect between their personal career vision, passions, parents views of the world of work, and outdated school and college curriculums. Subsequently at Harvard, I researched and identified India’s employability crisis as the most crippling to the Indian economy. This resulted in the birth of Talerang. Our first cohort received internship offers from Aditya Birla, Godrej, and Mahindra & Mahindra among other top-ranked corporate groups with 50 percent of them receiving placement offers,” says Raina.

In 2016 in partnership with a Harvard-Stanford research team, Raina visited several colleges in small town India. This research project awakened her to the high potential and reach of ICT (information communication technologies) for education dissemination. “We decided to go online with the hope to reach ambitious students in every college across the nation to prepare them for their dream careers,” recalls Raina. Talerang Online was launched in 2018.

Future plans. Encouraged by the success of Talerang’s online platform, Raina has drawn up ambitious future plans. “We have finalised a blueprint to increase Talerang’s user base exponentially by offering more tech enabled content. We are lucky to have partnered with top colleges and corporates in India but now we want to widen our reach to every Indian student. Indian industry is likely to experience a sharp recovery in the post-pandemic era. There will be a surge of demand for the workplaces ready graduates we provide,” says Raina.

Reshma Ravishanker (Bengaluru)

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