Teaching students to be future-ready

After graduating from Nottingham University Business School in 2014 with an MSc Marketing, Disha Mehta returned to India and worked for restaurant search and delivery company Zomato. Fuelled by a desire to explore communications and PR more deeply she enrolled on the Graduate Diploma in Communication programme at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 2017. Pondering on next steps and how to harness the skills and knowledge gained from her time at Nottingham and Melbourne, Disha returned to her home country the following year with a renewed sense of purpose and began working towards starting specialist student life skills company, Eskelait.

Disha explained: "Eskelait is a product of my combined experiences in the UK and Australia and a passion to help Asian students scale up to the best of their potential. Having faced the same struggles not too long ago, I quickly realised that while Asian countries collectively churn out some of the most hard-working and intellectually competent workforce, what most individuals lack is basic life-skills and soft-skills. This ranges from personal independence and sustainability to self-confidence, teamwork, public speaking, conducting good research, ethical practices, equality, inclusivity, workplace communications, interpersonal skills and so on. 

"One of the reasons for this is that our education systems in the majority of Asian countries are very different from their global counterparts. With a heavy stress on academia, teaching these skills from a younger age is often looked over. This results in students graduating with excellent grades but with great room for personal development. What’s more astonishing is that work on improving this situation is happening in very small concentrations."

During her own personal journey, Disha witnessed first hand many examples of Asian students missing out on important academic or work opportunities due simply to lacking basic life and social skills. Time and again she found recent workplace research that points to the same conclusion, namely, that while theoretical and technical knowledge are necessary, equally important is to hire people with great interpersonal skills who can represent their business on a global scale. Moreover, individuals with these skills are more likely to get higher salaries and promotion opportunities.

Resolved to proactively tackle this imbalance, Disha described the aims of her new company: "Eskelait designs life-skills, social-skills and soft-skills training programmes to promote personal growth and development. Along with this; we build on key theoretical concepts taught in school, to explain their practical applications. And finally, we provide a platform that provides basic information on the various jobs and industries that will form the careers of the near future. All of this is delivered through interactive workshops and group activities to make learning fun and the concepts memorable. Our aim is to have better impact on a students retention power.

"By breaking the monotony of traditional classroom study, while teaching valuable skills and lessons in a fun and effective manner, we can help students better utilise their time and resources and bring them up to par with their global peers, allowing them to grow and open the doors to better opportunities. 

"Although Eskelait is just two months old, we have already begun our sessions in colleges in Pune and our next tie-up is with a new age student accomodation entity to add value to the students who live on their campuses across India."