Vishvas Narayan2022 has not been a good year for the education tech industry as a whole. While some companies have been able to bag crucial investments letting them scale up and grow at a consistent pace, most other companies in the industry have been left in the mud and have been forced to revamp their entire business model and structure to cope with the massive slump.
The latest company to do this WhiteHat Jr, which is a subsidiary of Byjus, that came out to announce that they have been forced to down size their work force by around 300 employees after over 800 of the company’s employees gave in their resignation notice last month according to people close to the company and matter.
The second half of 2019 and the entire year of 2020 was the year for the education tech sector. With educational institutions being forced to close down due to the Covid pandemic and ensuing national lockdowns, people turned online for education and general knowledge which allowed companies in this sector to grow, receive massive investments, bump their valuation up, and heavily recruit the best talents that the country had to offer.
However, fast forward two years later, and with all forms of educational institutions open, the ed tech companies have been forced to take the back seat and rather these companies being people’s primary source of knowledge, they have taken up the role of supplementing education that people do in schools and colleges.
This has forced companies in the sector to come to terms that the slump of the industry is here to stay. Firms have been forced to cut their costs to cope with the size of the industry now. This has caused a mass exodus from the sector. Other companies have also been forced to let go off their people. Unacademy, which is one of the largest ed tech companies in the country has let go off around 750 of their people while Vedantu had to down size their work force by over 600 employees last month. Lido has by far been impacted the most over the past few months as the start-up company was forced to let go of around 1,000 of their people in just the month of February.
The main departments that have lost people in the company are part of the marketing and sales teams. Although many experts say that the industry can go back to where it was in the past, it is difficult to see it happening any time soon.