On a mission to face Industry 4.0

Working as a CEO for an organisation, Anuradha had to face the hard reality; incapability of engineering students to answer questions spontaneously, during the interview. This realisation ventured her on the path to bridge the gap between industry and academia, laying the foundation of Blackbuck Engineers, a start-up providing executive education courses.

Anuradha Thota, a master’s student from Osmania University, MBA graduate from Indian School of Business and an experienced professional from Wipro, with nearly 20 years of work experience, in 2013, founded her own startup. In the initial three years she and her 15-member team trained over 7,000 engineering and management students across colleges in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.

A strong proponent of education, her focus was on providing full-fledged educational courses than mere training. Blackbuck in collaboration with GITAM University began to provide Executive MBA, Post-graduation in emerging technologies, PG in Data Science, and PG in Artificial Intelligence.

“Engineering colleges run on a conservative mode with the absence of a vision. The urge to participate but lack of funds has the college managements’ hands tied. Moreover, world class education from ISB costs around Rs 40 lakh, which isn’t affordable for many. A thought to provide quality and affordable education has set me on the vision to start a University on the lines of Harvard or Stanford,” says Anuradha.

By 2019, she will be starting a college to provide masters and research course and include bachelor’s in engineering and management by 2020. Besides, by another four years Anuradha has set her goal to open a university providing education in all streams.

The Government of Telangana is underway to prepare the workforce for Industry 4.0,a period wherein repetitive and non-creative work will be taken over by artificial intelligence, bots, internet of things, machine learning, big data, data scienceand other new emerging technologies. Under this motive, the Government has lent a helping hand to Blackbuck, along with further support fromHysea (Hyderabad Software Enterprises Association) and syllabus reviewed by Nasscom (National Association of Software and Services Company).

Further, expressing her fear of student’s inability to narrow down onan appropriate job, and her voice echoed by the governments to drive student’s interest towards MSMEs and startups, she says, “there are jobs, but students are able to neither cater to them nor match their own standards to the corporate expectations. Before the bubble bursts they should realise, glass buildings and sophisticated ac corporate office is not easy to enter.

The government wants MSMEs to cater to young talent and young talent to choose them. The sector has individuals above the age of 50 on roll, hence unable to bring in new technology and stagnating its state. Mine and the government’s sincere call to these students is to choose MSMEs and startups for building a strong foundation.”

On closing notes, a self-made entrepreneur mentoring budding entrepreneurs with lessons she has learnt to grow up the ladder, her best advice is - work harder than anyone in the game, work smart in the right direction and work long enough.

Her wise words for the engineering students; network is net worth, build a strong network, the industry should know your presenceand secondly, engineering is about finding a solution for a problem through technology, students during their college period should get hands on experience, the best place to begin with are startups giving wealth of informationlike free education outside college boundaries.