Employee assessment solutions company Aspiring Minds is looking to build a data science ecosystem in the country with initiatives targeted at the youth to create a talent pool.

“The interest in data science is growing worldwide. This phenomenon is similar to the growing interest in computer sciences in the nineties. Since the amount of data is exploding, we need to build a talent pool of people equipped with skills to use this data,” said Varun Aggarwal, Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder of the Gurgaon-based company.

“We recently conducted a small experiment with about 14 students in Gurgaon. We hosted a data camp and children were taught some basics about data and how to use it in their day-to-day life,” he said.

The aim was to provide an idea of the whole cycle of data science – data collection, data entry/cleaning, feature extraction, visualisation and model building and also sensitise them to data security/permissions concerns.

Tie-up with colleges The company hopes to host workshops in Mumbai and Bengaluru and is eyeing college students who they will help to become trainers. These trainers, in turn, will train school children. “The activities are targeted between August and October this year,” Aggarwal added. The firm intends to leverage its tie-up with about 2,000 colleges for this purpose.

With this, the firm also hopes that time spent on initial training for its employees will also come down. “Currently, no college in the country offers courses on data science, hence this will be a challenging exercise,” he added.

Contest for students Aspiring Minds will also host a contest for college students interested in this space. “We will release multiple sets of data which interested students can play with and post their findings on an online platform. This will be open to students overseas as well,” Aggarwal said.

The company recently opened its first research and development facility in Gurgaon, which will see investments up to $6 million over the next three years.

Recruitment process The Gurgaon-based company helps firms with their recruitment process and was started by Himanshu Aggarwal and Varun Aggarwal on a personal savings investment of ₹20 lakh. In 2008, it received angel investment of $500,000 from Ajit Khimji Group and about $2.5 million in Series A round of funding from Omidyar Network in 2011.It is already working in the US, West Asia, China, the Philippines, and is looking at entering Bangladesh soon.

Its key clients include Genpact, HCL, Wipro, DuPont, Daimler, Deloitte, Coca-Cola, Bank of America, Tata Motors, among others.

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