As technology is superseding rapidly, the demand to equip the young generation with novel trends and technical know-how is also becoming an imperative affair. Catering to the domain of new-age knowledge, byteXL has emerged as the first-ever, one-stop-shop for self-learning course work and guided training of young minds. Headquartered in Hyderabad, byteXL has been instrumental in preparing a new generation of coders for the workforce since its inception in 2019 in India.

Founded in the USA in 2017, byteXL is led by experienced technology leaders from large IT majors who know exactly what it takes to get hired by the world's leading tech companies and help students accordingly to gain competitive advantage and confidence. An experiential online learning platform that is a hybrid model of online learning and online self-guided learning patterns, byteXL ensures instructor-led program that is provided in career tracks like artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, cloud DevOps and more.

Bridging the Gap
Founded jointly by Karun Tadepalli and Pavan Gorakavi owing to their perpetual experience in the academic world, byteXL is seasoned with the finest industrial leaders with impeccable experience and expertise to empower India's youth to upskill and compete with the world's best tech talent. "Prior to the inception of byteXL, we were operating as technology leaders of the corporate domain and while hiring candidates for our respective companies we could recognize the obvious gap between academic world and industry, especially in India. To bridge the gap between the academic learning and the industry requirement of the 21st century, we stealthily laid the foundation of byteXL in the US.

Soon we launched the organization in India as well with the help of our partner SV Raman who has been in this academic world for 30 years providing electrical and power systems labs for all the engineering colleges and institutions in India as well as South Asian countries. After reaching India, we ventured into the b2b model, where we reached out to

the engineering colleges to be a part of their mainstream curriculum. Rather than just being an in-time training partner, we are trying to see if we can inculcate the learning aspects among the students early in their engineering careers," says Karun Tadepalli, Co-Founder, byteXL.

Exploring Opportunities and Challenges
Accelerated due to the COVID Pandemic, the e-learning phenomenon is proving to be much more advantageous than the brick-and-mortar educational institutions owing to their unrestricted availabilities and unlimited scope of learning. With the traditional method of learning gradually becoming outdated, byteXL is all set to explore the vastness of the online learning platform equally embedded with opportunities and challenges. Ensuring equal opportunities to various vocational as well as mainstream courses, ByteXL is not only ensuring online learning capabilities like an assessment from the platform but also reading materials, videos, practice exercises along with more than 20 programming languages.

We intend to create a lot of awareness among the students, so that they can choose their careers by choice, rather than by chance.

"The remote instructor-led online teaching is more about getting in-depth into the career track. We are bridging the gap between the academic world and the industry. In the academic world, generally, the students would learn individual programming languages. Here in byteXL we train the students in such a way that these individual programming languages become a part of their career track and help them emerge as professionals in the field of artificial intelligence, machine learning, programme development, data science engineer, and many more.

Being an experiential online learning platform, a lot of the students can practice the coding along with skill assessment and discussion with industry experts to understand the current trends. Apart from that, we are helping the students with placement assistance by conducting job trials and tests with the support of our partner companies. We build Center of Excellence in coordination with the top tier companies as well as college and universities to drive innovation. We ensure instructor-led training, which is the hybrid of emerging technologies, driving innovation and entrepreneurship," states Karun Tadepalli.

Envisaging the Future
With phenomenal growth since its inception, byteXL has managed to impact more than 7500 students directly in the first year itself through influencing industry interface and exposure to relevant terminologies. "With Industry-specific soft skills as well as software engineering expertise for job readiness, byteXL is gradually emerging as a one-stop-shop for industry-relevant e-learning coursework, guided training and placement support. Currently, we are very much focused on Andhra Pradesh and Telangana but simultaneously trying to move into different parts of South India.

Being a content factory, we constantly keep on adding content into the platform, along with the assessments and exercises. We are planning to grow big in the coming years to help as many students as possible especially in tier two cities. The idea is to reach out to as many colleges as possible both in tier two and tier three cities and to see if we can make a bigger impact. We intend to create a lot of awareness among the students, so that they can choose their careers by choice, rather than by chance," conclude Karun Tadepalli and Pavan Gorakavi.