Skill-UP first started as a germ of an idea nearly 14 years ago when the founder was a management consultant at McKinsey & Company. While working on manufacturing transformations for clients, she began noticing a pattern of workforce development issues emerge time and time again: inadequate skills to prepare for i4.0 work environments; a fire-and-hire approach to plugging skill gaps in the organization; a new class of workers emerging who displayed little patience for long drawn-out trainings; antiquated enterprise software that made adoption irksome, and the gradual disappearance of old-world apprenticeship and job shadowing programs that resulted in the erosion of institutional knowledge - a slow and steady brain drain.

Fast forward a few years and the founder was working closely with line supervisors at Tata Motors and at FoxCONN. Two very different environments, but oddly, battling similar workforce issues - training a transient contract worker base in the former and maintaining line productivity in the face of high turnover rates in the latter. In both cases, she observed how experienced supervisors effectively harnessed the power of social learning, mentoring relationships and visual communication aids, to bring new workers up to speed quickly, effectively and accruing productivity and quality gains from the faster ramp-up.

A zillion frontline worker + academia +industry veteran interviews later, we have Skill-UP - the app soft-launched in Fall 2024. This milestone marks a step closer to the team's ultimate vision of having a world where blue-collar workers have as easy an access to skill development as their white-collar counterparts.