The move is aimed at helping prospective job seekers enrol in courses that could enhance their skills for better job prospects
By R Jai Krishna
Info Edge India, which runs the job portal Naukri.com, is venturing into the online learning space by launching a marketplace for course providers to sell their courses. The company sees this as an extension of its job portal business. “We already have the audience,” Hitesh Oberoi, CEO and MD of Info Edge, told FE. “We’ll be a marketplace.”
The move is aimed at offering courses to job seekers listed on their website to up-skill themselves as they search for new employment, he said. The company is betting on the 1.8 crore monthly active users that Naukri.com has. However, only 50-60 lakh of these users search for newer jobs, Oberoi said, adding these users could be the immediate potential target audience for its e-learning marketplace. The move is aimed at helping prospective job seekers to enrol in courses that could enhance their skills for better job prospects, Oberoi said.
Naukri’s e-learning marketplace is currently in its testing stage. This will be in addition to Info Edge India’s another educational portal called Shiksha.com, that offers information about various educational courses across India for users seeking under-graduation or post-graduation, he said.
Currently, the Naukri e-learning marketplace pilot project has courses in information technology, operations, design, finance, among others. VSkills, and IACT are its current partners for providing course content on its e-learning marketplace. It is also in talks with SimpliLearn.com and other course providers to bring their content on the marketplace, Oberoi said.
Info Edge will partner with the content and course providers on a revenue-sharing model, which varies between 35-50%, he said. In the next couple of months, it plans to have at least 100 different courses on its marketplace. The courses will be available from Rs 3,000-Rs 4,000 up to Rs 20,000-Rs 30,000, he said.
In the current fiscal, the new marketplace will have a “very minimal contribution” to Info Edge’s earnings, but in three-five years, the company is looking at the marketplace generating sales of Rs 100-150 crore, he added.
