Mission Skill Yatra: Yatra for Youths

In January 2019, IMS Proschool launched Skill Yatra — a CSR initiative built around a simple idea: instead of talking about India’s skill gap from behind a desk, take the conversation directly to students, on the road, one college at a time.

By the time Skill Yatra launched, IMS Proschool had already trained over 35,000 students across various career paths, working as a partner of the State and Central Government’s National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC). At the time, our academic associations included CFA, CIMA and ACCA, alongside other international certification bodies — CIMA has since been discontinued from our current course lineup, which today centres on CFA, ACCA, US CPA, US CMA, Financial Modeling, CFP and combined M.Com/B.Com-ACCA programs.

That training experience had shown us something consistently: a professional degree gets a candidate in the door, but it’s applied, real-world skill that makes someone genuinely valuable once they’re inside. We wanted Skill Yatra to put that message directly in front of young people, rather than leaving it as something only discussed in classrooms or corporate training rooms. For the fuller picture of the skill gap data and thinking that led us here, see our companion piece, #SkillYatra: The Story Behind India’s 2019 Skill Gap Campaign.

We also felt that a training provider working alongside NSDC had a natural role to play in this particular conversation — not by adding another course to the market, but by using our existing reach with students to talk about the problem itself. Skill Yatra was designed as that kind of contribution: a CSR effort rather than a promotional one, aimed at students broadly rather than just prospective enrolments.

Skill Yatra took a distinctive form: a bicycle roadshow. Rather than a conference, a webinar, or a digital-only campaign, IMS Proschool’s director, Kamlesh Sajnani, rode a bicycle across a stretch of Maharashtra to meet students where they were — quite literally, at their own college gates.

The first phase of the roadshow covered Thane, Mumbai and Pune — a route of roughly 500 kilometres. Mr. Sajnani, an educator and entrepreneur who had already spent over two decades mentoring young people, rode the route stopping at colleges along the way to talk with students directly: answering their questions, sharing guidance on careers and skill-building, and encouraging them to think beyond just collecting degrees. The choice of a bicycle wasn’t incidental — it was a deliberate way of signalling effort and endurance, the same qualities the campaign was asking students to bring to their own skill development.

The ambition behind the campaign was bigger than that first phase. Skill Yatra was conceived with a target of covering 20,000 kilometres in total, visiting colleges across the country to keep the skill-development conversation going, interact with students, and share practical career guidance. The Thane-Mumbai-Pune leg was the opening chapter of that plan — a proof of concept for a much larger, nationwide idea.

Alongside the on-the-ground visits, the campaign ran under the hashtag #skillyatra, giving students a way to follow the roadshow online, ask career and skill-development questions, and watch video updates from the road. That online thread was active through January 2019, timed to the roadshow itself, and gave students who weren’t on the direct route a way to still take part in the conversation.

What made Skill Yatra distinctive wasn’t just the distance covered — it was the format. College visits meant direct, informal conversations rather than lectures: students could ask about career paths, how to bridge the gap between what they were studying and what employers wanted, and how to start building applied skills alongside their degrees. Rather than a one-way talk from the stage, these were closer to open Q&A sessions — students raising their own specific worries about placements, further study, or which certifications were actually worth pursuing.

For a campaign about the value of real-world engagement, meeting students in person, mid-roadshow, dust and all, was very much the point. It also meant the message came from someone who had spent decades mentoring students directly, rather than from a marketing brief — which is likely why the college visits generated the kind of engaged, specific questions a purely digital campaign rarely does.

Skill Yatra was always framed as a phased campaign, and the version most people remember — and the one documented here — is that first 500-km leg through Thane, Mumbai and Pune in January 2019. It remains a moment we’re proud of: a tangible, on-the-ground way of putting Proschool’s belief in applied skills into practice, rather than just writing about it. It also reflected something about how we prefer to engage with students in general — directly, informally, and grounded in real conversation rather than broadcast messaging, a principle that still shows up in how we run student outreach today.

The spirit behind Skill Yatra — that real career readiness comes from pairing knowledge with applied, practical skill — is the same principle driving our programs today. Whether it’s CFA, ACCA, US CPA, US CMA, Financial Modeling, CFP, or our combined M.Com/B.Com with ACCA pathways, we still design every course around the same goal Mr. Sanjay carried through those college visits in 2019: helping students become genuinely job-ready, not just degree-holders.