CEO Insights Magazine

The edtech space has been growing at a rapid pace, predominantly due to the accelerated penetration of technology in the education sector and the increasing demand for quality educational content. A pioneer in the Indian edtech space is 21CC Education, which was set up with a mission to make learning fast, fun, gamified and to the point. “Learn anywhere, anytime” is their motto and their high-calibre skilling and recruitment solutions have helped them to not just build a positive reputation in the industry but also to create a niche in the market. 21CC Education is committed to enhancing the skill sets of frontline employees as a way of helping them carry out their existing jobs better as well as to qualify for better paying jobs. Sanjay Tiwari is the brains behind 21CC Education; with him at the helm, they have been able to break new business frontiers and strive for sustained success in the industry.

In an exclusive interview with CEO INSIGHTS, Sanjay talks more about his professional journey and the unique business operations of 21CC Education.

What motivated you to enter this business vertical?
The primary motivation came from the years of experience that I had in the industry working for other market leading companies. During this time, I got a lot of exposure dealing with frontline employees and the work they do. This experience helped me to identify a huge and often overlooked gap between what the higher ups want to get done versus what is actually done on the ground. I realised that the problem originated from the fact that the frontline workers are, typically, not told what is expected of them or even what the basic processes are and more often than not, they lack the proper tools that are required to get the desired results. This results in a lot of unfruitful guess work which adversely impacts their performance on the ground.

We wanted to find a better way of (up) skilling the frontline workers and explain to them what it is that we expect them to do. At the same time, we wanted to give them the proper tools and life skills to progress in their life. As the learners go through our content, they acquire the relevant skills attached to that learning material, thus building their 'skills passport', which travels with them across jobs, geographies and time. This kind of pre-skilling benefits employers too as workers are productive from day 1.

According to you, what separates 21CC Education from the rest in the market?
We have an easy-to-use, scalable and powerful mobile based platform: 21CC Skilled. This enables workers to develop the right skills to advance their careers and lets employers onboard their employees with ease and efficiency. We have a large library of educational content on logistics and transportation, health and safety, soft skills, such as communication skills and time management, and life skills, such as financial literacy and English language.


We create the content inhouse we are capable of digesting a company’s SOPs and processes and churning them out in bite-sized lessons that are much more engaging than traditional manuals and resentations. We bring the content to life through gamification animation and user engagement.

We don’t believe in a ‘one size fits all’ approach, we first understand

the requirements of the clients and, after that, offer customized solutions to them. At the same time, we also ask them: What are the behavioural changes that you wish to see in your employees? Understanding this aspect helps us to offer a much more curated and resultoriented solution to the clients. These detailed discussions that we have with the clients also allow us to plan the best course of action to derive positive results for both the company and its employees.

How do you keep yourself up to date with the latest trends happening in the market?
I utilise a lot of great platforms to get the latest information on the changing industry trends and conduct regular interactions with other pioneering content creators in the industry. As a result of this network we have built, we are working on multiple international projects as well. More importantly, we are always open to learn about new topics and this mindset has helped us to become passionate learners.

Owing to all this, we have been able to constantly evolve our skilling platform and content. Most recently we added an incentives and rewards feature in our app that allows users to see courses as challenges where in they are rewarded for completing as well as redoing them. This boosts a healthy competition between users and they often come back to do the modules and games multiple times and see their names rise up in the app leader board. For us, technology is just an enabler; the content and the desired outcomes are our top priorities.

As an industry stalwart what advice do you want to give to budding entrepreneurs?
The market potential is huge and there are lots of niche market opportunities arising in the market. So, don’t confine yourself to conventional areas, find an area that you are passionate about and have domain experience in; then, build your product and services around that..

Sanjay Tiwari, Founder and CEO, 21CC Education
Coming from a very international back ground, Sanjay is able to work comfortably with people from diverse backgrounds and understand what makes them tick. Under his guidance 21CC Education has won the Best E-learning Company award at the CII SCALE Awards two years in a row(2020 and 2021).