Yatra partners with upGrad arm for skill development services

Travel technology firm Yatra has tied up with upGrad Enterprise, a business-to-business (B2B) arm of edtech startup upGrad for advance learning and skill development services.

Through the partnership, upGrad will work with Gurugram based Yatra’s clients to build a deployment-ready workforce. The services are also expected to reduce employee attrition and align learning and development plan with business strategy, according to a statement. 

The B2B arm of upGrad offers training courses to enterprise clients in data science, technology and marketing. Its partnership programmes integrate with human resources systems, enabling the workforce to adapt to the digital transformation efforts. The company has so far trained 500 employees across verticals for enterprise clients, according to its website.

“In a tough economic climate, it is important to develop and reskill the workforce to overcome the challenges being presented. This unique partnership further paves our way to become an end to end business solution provider to our clients,” Dhruv Shringi, co-founder and CEO of Yatra said.

The announcement comes shortly after Yatra partnered with digital payments startup Zaggle to offer expense automation solutions to its customers.

Yatra, which provides information on all travel modes and offers packaged booking, hotel bookings and holiday packages on a retail basis, also offers corporate packages. The company claims to have a client base of over 850 companies and 20,000 small and medium-sized enterprises (SME). 

“We are excited to join forces with upGrad to provide a platform to our clients who are looking to develop employees’ potential specific to their businesses or a sector. This unique partnership further paves our way to become an end to end business solution provider to our clients,” Dhruv Shringi, co-founder and CEO, Yatra, said. 

"Our strategic partnership with Yatra, which is absolutely the first of its kind and creates a new milestone in the education industry, will be focused towards bridging this workforce skill-gap," Mayank Kumar, co-founder and managing director of upGrad said.

Founded in 2015, UpGrad claims to have onboarded over 30,000 paid learners. In April, upGrad announced that it has set aside $7 million to aid its plans to acquire at least two to three startups offering online learning, especially in the higher education space.

Yatra was founded in 2006 by former Ebookers Group (UK) executives Shringi, Manish Amin and Sabina Chopra.