Prateek Shukla and Team’s Journey
Prateek Shukla is the Founder, and CEO of Masai School – India’s first coding school started in June 2019 intending to revamp the Indian Education system from a degree-based to a skill set based system, having identified the need for industry-relevant skill sets which are lacking in students rather than a college degree to ensure that the new working class is job-ready from Day 1.
Prateek Hails from Bhilwara, Rajasthan. Prateek joined IIT Kanpur for his B.Tech with a specialization in Material Science and Engineering. He has been in the startup industry since 2013, having founded Grabhouse right after he completed his graduation.
Nrupul Dev has served as the tech lead and as a consultant in companies such as Digital Aristotle, Helping Doc, Acadly. Currently, he is part of the co-founding team and leads the coding classes at Masai School.
Yogesh Bhat, a graduate of IIM Bangalore, comes with an overall industry experience of 23 years, of which eight years are in the training and development field. Currently, Yogesh is the Vice president of Masai School.
What is Masai School all about?
Masai School is a military-style coding school that stands on the principle of Mastery-Based Learning. The company aims to create a job-ready workforce in the Software Development Space. The team has structured the program in sprints of 2-4 weeks each during which a candidate learns new technology and does hands-on work on the same.
Check out Masai School’s official website here.
Eligibility Criterion and Courses offered at Masai School
The eligibility criterion for applicants to get through the Masai School program is to clear the entrance process, wherein the team tests the candidates understanding of middle to high school maths, logical reasoning, reasoning ability, and communication skills. No degree/diploma or programming experience required for this program.
Currently, the team offers a 24-week intensive full-stack web development program, which runs 9-9-6, which is 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week for 24 weeks! The program includes 1000+ hours of hands-on coding and 100+ hours of each of soft skills training and building problem-solving skills, and all focused on creating a job-ready workforce.
Check out Masai School’s official website here.
Prateek Shukla’s Inspiration
“The future depends on what you do today.”
Prateek likes to travel to destinations that are not well known, during his one such trip to Tanzia where he stayed with the Masai Mara Tribe, where he learned that the members of the tribe pick one thing in their childhood and master that skill, that is why Masai Mara is the most influential tribe, Africa.
Which became the inspiration behind Masai School, and the same principle is applied in the curriculum – developing a deep specialization in one discipline with a holistic understanding of the ecosystem around it.
Challenges Faced in the outset
The idea of income sharing agreement mode is new in India, while the concept of learning to earn and pay when you get evokes a sense of uncertainty in the applicant, which sounds too good to true to candidates who have seen too many scams in our country.
We sculpted out the solution coming up with a very rigorous entrance process, which compares with some of the better institutions globally with an acceptable rate of only 3-4% to get the right candidate.
Eventually, with the transparency in the screening method and class curriculum, the team can prove through actions.
Collaborations and Growth of the company
The first collaboration was with HackerEarth on the recruitment side, which continues to date. Subsequently, the company has partnered with various tech companies for recruiting students.
Prateek believes that the students should be mentally and emotionally relaxed, the company recently partnered with Urban Yogi for the meditation practice of students in addition to developing skills the students who apply Meditation practices can better use themselves in various situations.
Hitting the first milestone and the vision of Masai School
The first milestone of the company was achieving 100% placement for the first batch within a month of their graduation, which was the best validation of the idea, including the selection approach, curriculum, and industry demand.
The company’s vision is to find untapped and underutilized talent give access to quality education for them to grab the most in-demand jobs in the world.
Masai School is introducing a new model of higher education in which the school invests in the students, instead of the other way around.
