Such a scenario—an IIT graduate imparting training to wannabe IITians for entry into the hallowed institution—works for all parties.
The coaching institute gets teachers of calibre who are also marketable. The aspiring engineer and her parents are happy that the training is being imparted by someone who has cracked the entrance code. And the IIT grad, who was probably struggling to get a well-paying job otherwise, is happy about landing one.
“Over the last five years, the edtech and coaching sector would have hired 3,000-5,000 IITians who are fresh out of campus or under five years of work experience,” said Narayanan Ramaswamy, partner and head of the education and skill development practice at consulting and audit firm KPMG in India. To be sure, there are more than 17,700 seats in India’s 23 IITs, and the number changes every year. Most of them are picked up by industries of different kinds.
Mint ascertained after speaking to experts that the edtech sector pays IIT grads a starting salary of ₹10-12 lakh per year, with a clear path to a ₹60 lakh-1 crore package in a few years. Traditional industries don’t offer as much on average. Only a handful of IIT graduates bag the headline-grabbing crore-plus salaries, while the median salary in many IITs is much less.
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“There are IIT graduates who earn ₹4-7 lakh at campus placements,” said Pramod Maheshwari, chairman and managing director of coaching institute Career Point, and an alumnus of IIT Delhi. “Compared to this, one gets ₹12-13 lakh at a coaching institute. While the last two years have been difficult for the coaching centres, the demand for IITians as teachers remains high.”
The difficult phase Maheshwari hints at includes the poor turnout of students in coaching hubs like Kota (Career Point is headquartered there), since students now prefer to study in branches near their home cities.
“A teacher can earn up to ₹60 lakh in a few years and the demand is especially high amongst the franchises where parents want the institutes to have more IIT graduates as teachers,” said Maheshwari.
At the same time, Ramaswamy of KPMG noted, “What is not tracked is, how many remain in this industry (coaching) after a few years of teaching? What career paths are built for them?”
Some, of course, stick around even after the initial phase. Take, for instance, Shlok Shrivastava, a 2013 graduate of IIT Dhanbad. In 2017, Shrivastava took up a faculty position at K-12 Techno Services, an edtech company that runs the chain of Orchids International Schools, in a desperate attempt to change his job. Shrivastava was employed in the mining sector but did not “enjoy” his first job.
While it was not his dream career, Shrivastava found his work “incredibly rewarding”, as students began to grasp difficult subjects like science and math in a more engaging way. “After joining the company, I received calls from several IIMs, which I chose to ignore. I also got an interview opportunity with a top consultancy firm, but I ignored that as well,” the 31-year-old told Mint.
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Shrivastava now heads the company’s academics division as vice president. “Out of 100 candidates, around 60-70 are genuinely interested in the work (teaching), while the remaining 30 are primarily focused on finding a job initially,” he said.
K-12 has hired nearly 200 IITians since 2017, offering salaries in the range of ₹7.5 lakh to ₹12 lakh annually, according to the firm. A majority of these hires are recruited from campuses of IITs like IIT Kanpur, IIT(BHU) Varanasi, IIT Dhanbad, IIT Mumbai, and IIT Bhuwaneshwar, among others.
K-12 is not the only one prowling the campuses. Mint has learnt that Allen Career Institute, one of the largest coaching centres, heads to the IITs during campus placements. Allen did not respond to Mint’s queries.
Other edtech companies, too, have been hiring IITians as faculty. While PhysicsWallah has hired about 99 IITians, Vedantu has hired around 50 over the past five years, according to the firms.
A spokesperson for Vedantu said the company pays about ₹6-8 lakh per annum (LPA) to freshers, ₹12-25 LPA to experienced professionals, and more than ₹45 LPA for top faculty. While most of its IITian faculty come with prior work experience, the company also recruits freshers from IIT Delhi, IIT Madras, IIT Kanpur, IIT Patna, IIT Jammu, IIT Bombay, IIT Roorkee, IIT Kharagpur and IIT Hyderabad.
According to the placement head of one of the newer IITs who spoke on condition of anonymity, the edtech firms are a regular at the campus. “They pay well and we often see the graduates including those who have done their masters take up a job there. However, in many cases it is a stop-gap arrangement of a couple of years before they head for another firm.” However, it must be noted that the profiles include data analytics besides faculty.
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The edtech sector is slowly resuming hiring after significant layoffs in 2022 and 2023, driven by reduced demand for online learning and a shift in focus from growth to profitability. However, challenges persist. According to Tracxn data, investments in the sector had dropped to just $325 million by September this year, a steep decline from the $4 billion peak in 2021, which was fuelled by the pandemic-induced shift to home-based learning.
Meanwhile, placement time is approaching at the IITs again. While placements at the younger IITs have begun, the older ones will start their final campus placements from the first week of December.
Of the 23 IITs, the first-generation schools—IIT Kharagpur, Madras, Bombay, Delhi, Roorkee and Kanpur—start the placement season in December. The second and third-generation IITs, along with the National Institutes of Technology (NITs), begin their placements in August-September.
Business schools, or B-schools, including Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), start placements from February 2025.