Upskilling means learning new, job-related skills after school or college, either to get a first job or to move to a better one. In India it is a large industry of its own. It sells bootcamps, short courses, certificates and online degrees to two kinds of learner: graduates who finished college without a job offer, and people who already have a job and want a better one.
Here is a typical case of the first kind. You finish a BTech in electrical engineering in Bhubaneswar with no job offer, and you want to become a software developer. You start with free videos on an online course marketplace, a website where teachers and universities publish courses that anyone can buy. Many of its courses follow the freemium model: the lectures are free, and you pay only for graded assignments and a certificate.
After two months, you join a coding bootcamp, a six-month course that trains you for one job, full-stack web developer. Its teachers take live online classes every evening, and an AI tutor answers your questions at night. You pay no fee up front. Instead, you sign an income share agreement (ISA): after you get a job, you pay a share of your salary for a fixed number of months. Other learners pay the fee with an education loan or in monthly instalments.
In the last month, the bootcamp prepares you for interviews. Most employers first test you on a coding assessment platform, which sets a timed coding problem in the browser and marks it automatically. You pass, clear two interviews and get an offer.
Now the second kind of learner. Three years later, you want to move into data science, but you cannot leave your job. So you join an online degree programme. A recognised university teaches the course online and awards the degree, and an edtech company builds and markets the programme for it. You study in the evenings and at weekends. Other working people choose shorter routes. Professional certification training prepares a person for one industry certificate, such as a cloud certificate. A cohort-based course takes a group of learners through a subject together, over a few weeks, with live sessions and projects.
School leavers have one more route. A tech-led college is a new kind of four-year computer-science college, run by a company, that teaches through projects. Its degree is awarded by an existing university, because a degree counts only if a recognised institution awards it. This rule is called accreditation.
Who pays? Most learners pay for themselves, often in monthly instalments. Companies also pay to train their own employees. That training is usually assigned and tracked in the company's learning management system (LMS) for companies.
The industry is now changing. AI models write much of the simple code that bootcamps trained people to write. So courses are teaching more about reviewing and testing code, and about working alongside AI tools.