Karthik K.S. believes that you never really stop learning. He, for one, is doing it all the time. It seems appropriate, therefore, that he should be heading 24X7 Learning, which he describes as “India’s largest eLearning implementation company and an emerging global leader”.

The founder and CEO of this Bangalore-based firm says that his potential clients are the 230 million youth of the country. “They will be our biggest business drivers,” he explains. “In which other country can you get such a huge number of customers?”

He would have loved to have had access to an organisation such as 24X7 Learning when he was young as it offers a cafeteria of options.

Karthik’s own education was more of a random walk. After his schooling at St Xavier’s School in the steel city of Durgapur, Karthik obtained an engineering degree from the National Institute of Technology, Kurukshetra, and then went on to do his MBA from Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Delhi. “I did engineering because I didn’t know of any other field that would give me a decent living,” he says. “But if I were to decide today, I would have preferred English literature.”

Karthik still remembers that his first paycheque was Rs 2,800. Those days, an engineering degree with an MBA to boot didn’t take you very far. But just four months down the line, he got an increment of 40 per cent. “It was a great confidence booster. In a way it changed my life. I was able to tell myself that I had it in me to give wings to my imagination,” says he.

That flight took some time. Karthik worked at places like PCL, HCL-HP and Microland before taking his entrepreneurial plunge. And it was quite a gamble. “When I with my friend, Anil Chhikara, decided to set up this firm, we didn’t have a concrete business plan. It was an impulsive decision,” he says.

Karthik and Chhikara established 24X7 Learning in 2001. This was an area that was relatively new to India and unexplored. Adding to the uncertainty was the fact that, with the dotcom burst, everyone was running scared at the mention of the Net. “I guess we believed in what we were doing and our success proves it,” he says.

Today, 24X7 has an employee strength of around 65 based out of six cities in India and aims to be one of the world’s largest companies in its field. “Our initial investment was just Rs 4 lakh. Today we have reached a stage where we have to focus on managing growth. Otherwise we have everything in place — talented manpower, vision for the company and clear goals,” says Karthik.

What exactly does 24X7 Learning do? It upgrades the skills of employees of companies through online training. “It is quite possible that many employees of a company are not aware of the latest advances in technology that may be relevant to their field. We bridge this gap by training the employees, while keeping them within the comfort of their organisation’s four walls. The only thing a person needs is a computer,” says Karthik.

Once a person logs in and informs 24X7 Learning about his skills, the software automatically determines the new skills that the employee has to acquire and prepares a customised solution. The company has trained over 4,60,000 employees in the five years of its existence.

The company is now focussing its attention on imparting “employable skills” to engineering and other graduates to help them meet the exacting standards that various industries demand. “Our institutes churn out millions of graduates every year, but a majority of them are not employable as they lack the necessary skills. We believe we might be of great help there,” says Karthik.

Apart from his company, Karthik has founded an NGO, Tvesha, that helps and encourages poor and needy students to educate themselves through various initiatives. “One day I was driving home around 11 pm, and was at a traffic signal when a child with a clutch of pencils came near my window and begged me to buy them. I offered him Rs 10 and asked him to keep the pencils. He refused and said that he was not a beggar. I liked his sense of self-respect. It was on that very night that I decided to do my bit for society,” says Karthik.

His company 24X7 may not get Karthik 24X7, but education will.

Based on a conversation with V. Kumara Swamy in Calcutta