Over seven years back, we founded Great Learning based on a simple, but strong belief – anyone with the desire to learn and willing to put in the effort should have access to high-quality education that can transform their careers and lives. The basis for this belief came from our own experiences – my team and I were among the fortunate ones who studied at India’s and the world’s best educational institutions, which transformed our lives. We strongly felt that one’s career (and life) trajectory should not get decided based on how one performs in a 3-hour entrance examination. Anyone should be able to learn and transform their careers anytime they choose to throughout their careers and have second (and third) chances. We should be able to provide such transformational learning to millions of learners.
We knew that traditional educational models cannot achieve these objectives. There just aren’t enough good faculty and high-quality institutions. So, we had to innovate and use technology to democratise access to quality higher education. We partnered with India’s (IIT Madras, IIT Bombay, Great Lakes) and the world’s (Stanford, MIT, UT Austin, Northwestern) best academic institutions and enabled the impact of their amazing faculty to reach lakhs of learners. We invented the concept of “live mentored learning”, where learners get personalized attention from dedicated mentors that take them through their learning journey. We partnered with over 2000 industry experts, who joined us in our mission and discovered the joy of helping others learn. And we built a team of over 700 passionate colleagues who deeply believe in our purpose and are determined to fulfil our mission.
Through these innovations, we have been able to deliver over 30 million hours of impactful learning and enable over 3 lakh learners to transform themselves. These #greatlearners inspire and motivate us every day with their stories of effort, struggle and eventual success. They have given us the confidence that we can do a lot more and that we have the essential ingredients in place to do so. And we understand that we have barely scratched the surface of solving the problem of making high quality, transformational education accessible to all.
Throughout this journey, one of our core values has been a commitment to excellence and continuous improvement. As we strived for this, we were always inspired by our cricketing hero and the #1 cricketer of this generation, Virat Kohli. He is a living embodiment of our values – he pursues cricketing excellence constantly and relentlessly; he continuously learns and improves himself through disciplined effort. In doing so, he has emerged as the best in the world in this generation of cricketers.
Virat Kohli represents the aspirations of Young India. And we cannot think of a better person to represent Great Learning as our brand ambassador. He inspires us and he will inspire millions of learners to pursue their dreams with dedication and realise them through high quality education delivered by Great Learning. We are thrilled that our vision, values and approach resonated with him and he will be part of our Great Learning journey. With tremendous excitement, all of us at Great Learning look forward to this next phase of our journey, one where we hope to extend the magical impact of high-quality education to millions of learners.
