21CC Education imparts training services across diverse sectors, helping potential candidates catch up with the right skillsets, while helping companies attract the right talent. Sanjay Tiwari, Founding Partner of the company shares insights into the skill building aspect of the logistics industry and underscores the need to formalise the approach.
I just read out a very impressive profile of yours with lot of industry background across various verticals and also you now got into education. Though it says that 21CC Education is essentially for training and education in logistics and shipping, I would like to hear more about what exactly that you offer at 21CC?
What we offer is training for frontline employees predominantly, teaching them what is expected from them in large logistics company. So, whether it is air freight, ocean, trucking, warehousing; what they need to be able to do from day one? That’s what we try and teach people because I, through the years, saw so many people getting into a job and spending, on average 6 months, trying to find out what’s the ins and outs of logistics. We are not a very easy to understand industry for people coming in from outside. So, people would spend 6 months fairly lost and that seemed to me like wasted time. Why should somebody waste 6 months trying to figure out what’s what. It’s not good for the employee; it’s also not good for the employer because just even from a business point of view, the employer is not getting value for money for 6 months. So, what do they need to understand? Can we accelerate the process? That was the basic idea behind it.
Let us discuss in detail education and logistics. Can you give me a current scenario, we keep hearing that we don’t get skilled manpower in logistics and it is not easy to find; this is not a very romantic industry or where career is very attractive for the young generation. So, what is the scenario like, the skilled manpower in logistics segment and where are the gaps?
So, two or three things, I am going to disagree with you at one point. I know you said it to provoke, but it’s a very romantic industry. People who get into this industry, once you are in and once you get past a particular stage, it’s almost impossible to leave. You have talked to people who are in shipping, whether they are loading containers or they are sailing on a container ship or even if they are onshore, handling these massive vessels coming in, whether it is a container ship or bulk, people in the airline industry, you watch a huge 747 take off with close to 100 tonnes on-board every single day, that’s extremely romantic. So, for people in that business, they would beg to differ. I think the challenge is in getting people to understand that it’s that cool an industry. It’s a bit like playing with LEGO toys when you are a kid and you grow up and suddenly you find you are able to load aircraft or trucks or warehouses, etc. But I think there is a massive gap in terms of explaining that to people outside. I have always admired the hospitality industry. If you to a 5-star hotel, you don’t have to worry that you are getting served the right meal. You order a particular meal; you know you are going to be served that particular meal.
In logistics, we tend to make that a mystery; you may get a parcel, you may not get your parcel. It may come on Tuesday, but it may also come on Wednesday; and we accept it. We say there’s a 15% non-performance, it’s okay. It’s not okay; that 15% costs the business money, it’s bad for the business, it’s bad for the customer, it’s bad for the employee. So, can you skill somebody to know that he needs to do something 99% correct all of the time because it’s good for him, good for the business, etc., and I think that’s the gap that we are trying to close and there are lot of professional businesses by the way who manage to hit that 99%. We have a client in the Netherlands, very large warehousing firm, called Technical Union, very large warehousing delivery and the supply chain manager of that company is also a good friend. He agonizes over his 1.5% non-quality, and I said 1.5% is great, he says no because on 100,000 parcels a day, 1.5% means that I am still screwing up on 1500 parcels, that’s not acceptable to me. So, that kind of gap, if you like that, we need to close in. We need to equip people with the skills to be able to do that job well and to be proud about doing a job really well, that’s what I would say.
What is the industry perspective? In the sense, like, what would be the demands of the industry as we move into the next century? What kind of skilled manpower is required, one. Second, is the industry willing enough to spend on, whether it is in-house training or upgrading their skills or maybe recruiting very skilled manpower. So, can you give me an insight into that?
So, very good question. The first one – what is it that we are looking for, right? You know the industry, the amount of automation coming into our industry is unparalleled. What is logistics? People think if I go to logistics, I am going to be driving an old Tata Truck or I am going to be working in a Government of India warehouse; that was the image of logistics, you are going to go down and you throw some gunny bags and then 2 months later somebody picks up that gunny bag, he moves it out. That was logistics. Today, logistics has become a very technology intensive industry whether you are in shipping, airline business, e-commerce; I mean all of us are ordering goods from Amazon and Flipkart every single day. How do we think those parcels get to us? Through the most amazing use of technology. So, there’s a lot of automation coming in, there’s a lot of robotics coming in, there’s a lot of cold chain related technology coming in because our habits are changing. We all know that because of the vaccine, there is a lot of cold chain related infrastructure getting rolled out but even without that our food and drink requires cold storage facility. So, the need for people in logistics going forward will be with skills with a much better understanding of IT.
So, whether that person is entry-level employee or he/she is a senior manager, everybody needs to be able to use a scanning device and input some basic amount of data, that’s one big change and getting people to know that on day one is super important. Then of course, there are social skills, there are ability to manage networks, etc. could go on. The second part of your question is very good, it’s something you and I have talked about extensively when we met through the years and I see the landscape changing very rapidly for the better, super happy to say that. If you talk even 2 to 3 years ago and take the event you and I met in Mumbai, we had people from the shipping industry. The mindset was still, people think well maybe I should invest in my people, maybe I shouldn’t but if I do, they will go somewhere else; that was still the old mindset. The young people in this industry, managing large facilities are doing a very simple calculation, how fast can I get my staff up and running. We had a pitch few weeks ago to India’s largest ed tech company. So, you can guess the name of the company India’s largest ed tech company, you see their ads everyday. They want to get our content, so we were very surprised, why do they want to have our content because they are opening a warehouse in Bangalore, they have 60 people working there and they did the math, how fast can we get these people to be productive, how fast can we get these people to use the ERP system that we are developing and service our customer. They have a much bigger goal in mind. So, they don’t have time to waste, It has to happen right now and this was an IIT Ahmedabad graduate who is running that whole facility and he had done the math. I was in Badli in Haryana two weeks ago. I can share some pictures with you and I was at a TVS logistics warehouse and I was so impressed by the manager there, young guy in his mid 30s and his dashboard was amazing. He was measuring everything, diesel consumption, packaging consumption, downtime, uptime, everything. So, for him having trained people was critical because he had a metric for every single thing. He was measuring accidents, every month he had a different safety theme. So, for a person like him to say no no, I don’t need to train people is not a question. So, I think that mindset is changing very very rapidly and for the better. That’s the good news.
Let us talk about government. What is the government policy or initiatives to recognize this sector, the need for skill building and training. I also understand that now you have partnered with NSDC which is skill development corporation, which is a good thing, but one, tell me what are the initiatives from the government and how this association with NSDC helps. How does it roll out?
Sure. I will come to the NSDC thing in a minute but I have been fortunate to be privy to some of the things that the government is conceptualizing, particularly the special secretary of logistics, Mr. Agarwal has taken a very very close interest in large-scale skilling of people and he says think big, number one. Number two, he wants to think of career paths in the logistics sector. So, for me, this is very heartening that somebody at that level is thinking about our sector. Okay, you can say it’s his job, but he is going beyond that. He is saying, how can we skill 1000s if not 100s of 1000s of people to come into this sector; so we have that buy-in from somebody at that level and with his team, he is thinking of career paths. He wants to refine career paths, which I think is hugely necessary. If you want to get somebody into this sector, you can’t just say, can you start picking up a box from tomorrow; that’s not a very appetizing way to get somebody in, right. But if you say to somebody, okay, you need to pick up a box and you need to do this for a few months but by the way, then you can become a team leader and then you can become a supervisor and then you can become a manager and some day you can become the CEO of the company, that’s a very compelling proposition, right.
So, the government, I think, is doing some great stuff is this domain and the NSDC is of course part of the whole public-private ecosystem and for us, it matters hugely. You know, to be able to offer our content on the e-Skill India platform which they have put in and again, I think it’s a great initiative. We are active as 21CC in India, we are active in the Netherlands, we are now looking at the US market and I can tell you that none of those countries have the kind of ecosystem that India is in the process of putting in place. You know, we have 92 qualification packs NSDC has for the logistics sector alone. There are 2300 qualifications packs in total where NSDC with its sector skill counts has defined all of these jobs. That’s a fairly unique body of work. So, in answer to your question, what does it mean for us, I think it gives a lot of validation because at the end of the day, people in the market respect the NSDC, it has been around for more than 10 years and it has a standing which, on your own, it is difficult to equate.
If any individual who is looking to get a job in logistics or a company which wants to train its employees, so how does 21CC work? Can you give me a use-case kind of a thing? How does the whole thing work?
One of the big realizations for us, I would say in the last 18 months, even though we are in the learning businesses, unfortunately most of our audience is 10th pass, 12th pass or even college grad, doesn’t wake up in the morning thinking, I wonder what skill I should acquire. I would love for that to be the case but that’s not the case. People wake up thinking how do I get a better job and especially somebody who is at the low-end. Let’s be honest, somebody is earning 15,000 rupees a month, his or her predominant question is how do I earn 20,000 a month. When they are earning 20,000, how do I earn 25,000 a month, right. So, it’s a very economic drive. It’s not so much a knowledge-driven drive. It’s okay for you and I, you have an impressive collection of books and you are at a different stage of life. But for a young person earning 15,000, how do I earn 20,000 and take better care of my family? So, we said we need to put employee ability first. Whether that person is outside of a company trying to get in or that person is in a company trying to get to a different level and I managed large teams in India and young people in India are very impatient. Much more so than any of the people I have met in the United States or Europe, etc. and it’s because of that drive that they have. So, we said let’s help people discover the jobs that are available.
So, in our app, in our platform, we say, are you interested in this and this job? We help you understand what that job is about, through an app and then we say, by the way, in order to qualify for this job, you need these skills and in order to acquire these skills, you need to take this content, and then that content is presented to you, on an app, in a very Netflix-type interface, you literally scroll, you can scroll from top to bottom, you can scroll from left to right and you can click and see, well this module looks good or this game looks good; we do a lot of gamification; click on a game, and you are playing a game, but while you are playing a game you are acquiring a skill, so we are making learning fun, and it’s probably more fun than when you and I went to school, because through gamification you are acquiring that skill. Now, all of a sudden the app is building up a profile of you in the background, a digital resume and says, Oh Ram Prasad has suddenly acquired these and these and these skills. He is now actually competent in these aspects of cold chain management or these aspects of picking, packing. He now understands what a WMS or TMS is and therefore he is qualified for this job. So, whether it is for an employer willing to train their employees or a person coming in from outside, we have related everything to jobs and we used the NSDC’s qualification packs to kind of measure which skill somebody has acquired so we have gone and built that into the app.
So, is there a kind of a matchmaking between the job requirements and the training and also do you help in getting jobs?
Yes. So, the answer to both is yes. We have an app which is a front-end. The front-end looks nice and cute but the backend is a very robust job posting system which the recruitment manager, she will be using and she says I am looking for these and these skills. Now, either she takes the QP that we have put into it and she can use the NSDC’s QP, I can show that to you or she says, I want to put in my own, right. But those skills are being used in the job posting and then on that basis somebody is playing the game, etc. and almost without knowing it they find out that they are qualifying for a job. In answer to your second question, absolutely we help in job, in matchmaking or job making whatever the correct answer for this is, job matching. So, there is for example, DB Shenker has gotten live on that system and we are hoping other employers will join very soon where they say I am posting these jobs and we are galvanizing candidates for them and telling them that these 50 or 100 candidates match the requirements that you have for this job. So, instead of simply saying 100 boys and girls are going to show up tomorrow, we say no, 100 people are going to show up tomorrow and these are their skillsets, this is what they have scored, this is what they are good at, this is what they are not so good at, etc. So, it gives that recruitment manager a fantastic sense of what that population looks like, right.
Logistics is a very broad word and under that we have several segments. Logistics means warehousing, freight forwarding, packing, loading, what not..trucking..So, exactly, where does 21CC come into play?
We are focused on this sector. We don’t exclude anything in this sector. So, we have stuff on air cargo, ramp handling, palletisation, weight & balance, very nerdy subjects which are very important because if a pallet is wrongly built up, it can actually damage the aircraft and cause other issues. Modules on containerization, trucking, defensive driving, dangerous goods, cold chain I mentioned, warehousing, different picking methods, different packing methods. So, we are not excluding anything in logistics and you know it, it’s such a vast domain that you can be very happy in this domain for years and years to come. We now have 115 plus e-learning modules and we can easily plus another 100 and we would still not be done because it’s that kind of thing. The other day I was with a young warehouse manager in Badli and he said, I need modules on different picking techniques per aisle. So, he was coming up with a very specialized topic which only he would have known. He was telling this is what I need you to develop for me because he wants his people trained on the picking techniques per aisle.
Is this limited to onshore or offshore also you have some focus?
We don’t have anything offshore as yet. Would love to. There are and you know the Government of India has actually also taken the lead and I think when the previous DG shipping Mr. Deepak Shetty was on one of the webinars that you had co-hosted. Actually, it kicked-off this fact that people who are offshore, who are sailing should be able take their courses digitally. So, I think that was already a big innovation. The government has gone for this. But we think there is a lot of scope to further improve this, the fact that you have digitized a training manual is one thing, but we think there are ways to make it more interactive. So, we would love to bring some of what we do and what we think we do well into the maritime domain. But we haven’t done anything in there yet.
When we talk about logistics industry, we talk about lot of numbers like ..it is 13% to 14% of GDP, the cost and it’s a huge industry with a potential for billions of dollars. There is a growth prospect and all that. Do you have any statistics on the manpower that is required for this industry?
I would have to differ. One of my industry colleague has quoted in one of the sectors that I think it was the airline sector would require around 400,000 if I recall people at fairly short notice, you know, that’s in both ramp handling and in the freight forwarding industry and the cargo handling industry. Over the next couple of years, the NSDC had put out a figure that logistics overall, I think, would require to the tune of 15 or 20 million people going forward. That number is only increasing. I know of …I won’t mention their name but a particular employer who we are dealing with, who says we are going to 10x the number of delivery people that we are going to have on the road in the next 48 months. So, they are going to go from tens of thousands to lakhs of delivery people in the next 48 months. So, that’s one employer. You can imagine what that’s doing on the ground. If you look at all the large warehousing companies, it’s like Stellar value chain or Reliance themselves and delivery and Schenker and DHL, all of them; they are all looking to 1.5x or 2x their footprint, in some cases, quadruple their footprint over the next couple of years, so I don’t think there’s any end in sight at the moment because I think as a country we are also busy catching up in this domain.
What are the challenges that you see while skilling this manpower? In your operations as well as when dealing with people or companies, do you see there is any gap areas where maybe the government or industry should focus more on?
Well, I think what I mentioned earlier, you know the government also coming up with career paths, etc., I think it’s going to help that we have as an industry not been very formal about how we do some things and I worked in it for a number of years, some things about this industry I to date can’t understand. I told you about the hotel industry earlier, take the airline industry, they buy a Boeing 747 can cost anywhere between 130 to 150 million dollars. The airline buying the aircraft, they have arranged financing, so they have got the whole financial concept done, they have arranged for the fuel, they know exactly who is going to deliver the fuel at what cost, they have arranged for the landing rights, everything. Yet when it comes to the people who have to load and unload that aircraft, it’s like yeah, we will get somebody and they literally two weeks before the aircraft has to land, so we have to go and grab some people off the street and let’s get them to load an aircraft. You have got a $130 million aircraft and you can’t be bothered to train people, right. I think if we as an industry and the government helps to become more formal and say these are the skillsets that are required, these are the jobs, formalize a job, you can’t walk into a hospital tomorrow in Hyderabad and say yeah, I think I will become a nurse tomorrow or I think I will just assist this brain surgeon with his surgery, you can’t do that.
Our industry, we will have anybody, in fact, we have no system and we will allow anybody to walk in and because there is no system, people think what can this lead me to, but I think some degree of formalization will help in this domain to grant more respect to the industry.
