The eSoftBank-backed digital learning titan Unacademy has halted the contracts of a few of its instructors who help students with their NEET and IIT-JEE doubts. The contracts have been halted for a period of 6 months as a component of its expense dropping strategy after earlier claims of terminating over 1K+ staff earlier this year.
On July 31, these contracted teachers were fired without giving them any prior warning and no notice period. It’s unclear how many contracted teachers have been impacted by the change. Moneycontrol was the first one to break the story. According to one of their sources, “On Sunday (July 31) both sets of educators (IIT-JEE and NEET) got emails stating that their contracts were suspended for a minimum period of six months.”
According to the source, a 6 month suspension is the same as being dropped from the Unacademy program. “It means that their services are not required for six months starting August and they will not get paid during the period. Suspension of contract for six months is equivalent to that they are out of the system,” Moneycontrol’s source added.
Unacademy informed in a letter to the worried instructors that it was undertaking “strategic changes” that would lessen the requirement for a forum for clearing any issues. Unacademy’s e-mail to the dismissed trainer reads, “Thus, we have decided to temporarily suspend all deliverables related to doubt solutions as mentioned in your content provider agreement.
This is the most recent step in the firm’s expense-cutting initiatives after founder Gaurav Munjal made the announcement that expenditures would need to be reduced in July in both a public and an internal email. He had further mentioned that there won’t be any further firings after the last layoff and that that groups would be reorganized to make room for “redundant” workers.
“We will continue to drive efficiency by reducing unnecessary expenses. We have some redundancies in some teams as well, so we will be moving team members from those teams to businesses that are blitzscaling like Unacademy Centers, core engineering, etc,” Munjal had said.
The action was taken not long after Gaurav Munjal, the founder of Unacademy, made the company’s survival manual public. While the company had $350 Mn or more in the bank, Munjal had informed the Unacademy staff that the funds had been handled inefficiently. Despite the worrisome nature of these measures, he emphasized that the company was in excellent shape.
