Customization of Education Needed for Growth in Coaching Industry: Nitin Vijay

Nitin Vijay, MD, Motion Education Pvt Ltd and VP, Byju’s JEE NEET Division, talks about his journey and what needs to be done to grow in the coaching industry

Self-made entrepreneur Nitin Vijay is coming up with an e-programme to help kids aged between 8-16 years develop entrepreneurial skills. He has carved a niche in preparing students for prestigious JEE and NEET examinations in India. The new age and early starter-entrepreneur Nitin Vijay is a name to reckon when it comes to imparting quality competitive examination education. Vijay successfully runs his institute in Kota (Rajasthan) with branches in more than 18 cities in India for the last 13 years. So, how did it all start?

Born and brought up in Kota, he studied at IIT. From starting, he decided to be a teacher. In semester breaks of IIT, I started teaching. “During the breaks, I thought of giving it a try, but teaching students and making sure that the students grasp what you’re teaching are two different things. It is not about knowledge; it is about how you deliver the knowledge. So, I taught in the first year of my college and by God’s grace, I got a tremendous response,” he says.

Challenges faced

In the first year, his father told him that it should not affect his studies. His father threw a challenge and asked him to have a job apart from teaching and do B.Tech with honours. He accepted the challenge and worked 15-16 hours daily. In his second to the fourth year, he used to sleep for about five hours only. After passing out from college, he got a job with IBM and then a job in the coaching industry; he chose this field to prove himself to his father.

“When I started a coaching institute, we did not have money. We are from a middle-class family. I started with only Rs 10,000 that I saved from coaching I used to give during my graduation days. Initially, we cleaned the institute ourselves, as we didn’t have enough money for peons. We had to face other challenges as well, such as the environment was not good in Varanasi, so I stopped coaching there and came to Kota,” he says.

To bring the organization to this level needed hard work as Kota already had many bigger names. “To compete without money backup was tough. I was only 23 years old, and to have faculty much older than you was one of the difficult tasks. I did not have a business background, and no one trusted me. My habit of working long hours paid off,” he informs.

Education scenario over the years

The government and school education have criticized coaching industry for many years. Some people do it even now, but most have realized the importance of the coaching industry. “School education and coaching industry are two different things; it is like the difference between a hospital and a specialized hospital for cancer. We need to understand this difference. It’s not like schools don’t have capabilities, but they have so many other things to do. We are specialized in academics for competitive examinations, which is very much required nowadays. We have to understand there is a huge difference between board exams and competitive exams; methodology and strategy for board examinations and competitive examinations are vastly different,” he says. That is why people started to understand the importance of coaching institutes in the last 15-20 years.

What are the changes in the coaching industry? “Around 20-25 years ago, every city had teachers who used to teach individually at their homes. Then some people started to give structure to this mode, and that’s how coaching institutes evolved. Before COVID, everything was going well. Now, the problem is not content in the industry but what should be given to a particular student; education needs to be customized. We need to identify their mistakes and weakness and give them solution accordingly. Now, the industry needs to customize education to grow further,” says Vijay.

Role of Technology

Technology is helping the industry to identify the weaknesses of individual students and find out the topics where the student needs help. Basic technology required is for video lectures, recorded lectures, test papers, and quizzes. “AI and machine learning will help analyze the student's weakness from the input that student gives on online tools. The best thing that happened during the pandemic is that we have evolved to know what we have to do in the coming ten years. A perfect combination of human intervention along with technology will help the coaching industry a lot,” he says.