Chandigarh-based Jaiprakash Singh Hasrajani is the co-founder and CEO of Taaleem Academy Pvt. Ltd (estb. 2009), the holding company of Taaleem India, a skills development enterprise providing learning management system (LMS) packages to education institutions and corporates, and the Taaleem College of International Studies (TCIS), Chandigarh which offers business management study — including MBA — programmes.
Newspeg. Taaleem Academy recently signed accords with the Asian Inter-national College (AIC), Singapore, and Asia Pacific Management Center of Griffith University, Australia, to offer their programmes in TCIS. Moreover in school education, Taaleem India has signed up with an international company which develops LMS software for K-12 institutions.
History. Since it was promoted four years ago, Taaleem Academy has forayed into school and higher education, LMS, corporate training, and delivery of programmes of reputed institutions such as AIC and Griffith. Taaleem Academy and its offshoots have evolved from the joint initiative of Gursimran Kaur, an alumna of Warwick Business School (UK) and an NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) practitioner who prom-oted ValueurHR-Solutions Pvt. Ltd in 2006, and Hasrajani, a graduate of Pune University and a former HR manager with several well known companies including Quark and Dell. In 2009, Hasrajani called it quits and teamed up with wife Gursimran to promote Taaleem Academy the same year.
Last October, the couple set up the Taaleem College of International Studies in Chandigarh and admitted its first batch of 20 students into the MBA programme. Meanwhile, Taaleem India has stepped up its promotion drive in schools, colleges, and corporates offer-ing counseling, skilling and training programmes through 45 trainers. Currently Taaleem Academy, which has nodal offices in J&K, Delhi, Ahmed-abad, Bangalore and Mumbai, has signed up partners in Himachal Pradesh and Punjab, and is drawing up plans to expand its reach across India through the franchise model.
Direct talk. “As HR professionals, we discovered huge gaps between the skills of school and college graduates and industry requirements. So when we moved from Delhi to Chandigarh in 2003, our aim was to enter businesses which would improve education quality and bridge this gap. Taaleem India was promoted as a vocational skills develop-ment company and TCIS as a B-school. Since then, we have trained more than 24,000 people in skills development and placed 6,000 MBAs in industry,’’ says Hasrajani.
Future plans. The enterprising duo is well aware of the importance of scaling up operations to create impact, given the magnitude and diversity of India. “By year-end, we expect to have 12-15 of our own centres and are examining the franchising option as well. Our objective is to make Taaleem Academy a comprehensive skills development enterprise for school-leavers through Taaleem India, and for college graduates through TCIS,” says Hasrajani.
Wind beneath your wings!
Autar Nehru (Delhi)