Exclusive Interview with Ashish Khare, Founder of MentorKart

Career acceleration is not a matter of chance but a matter of choice. It takes a lot of effort and planning on the part of career climbers to get to the destination of their dreams. Most of the students work faithfully following the plan to the hilt but fail at some point of time in their journey. The reason – they do not get to seek guidance from experienced mentors. MentorKart is a career acceleration platform with a mission to make students and the country future-ready. Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with Ashish Khare, Founder of MentorKart.

1. Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that your company offers.

MentorKart is a technology-based mentoring platform. We aim at unlocking the potential of the students, young professionals, and early-stage entrepreneurs and help them achieve their professional goals, overall career development, and industry placements by providing them with mentoring from mentors and coaches from India and around the world.  We have 3 key services

For Students: At MentorKart, we have developed a one-of-a-kind industry mentoring program for university students, regardless of their major stream and the job role they wish to pursue. We also make them job-ready and run a job guarantee program.

We provide holistic support to the youth so as to enhance their skills and help them meet the industry expectations thus leading to their career acceleration and growth.

For Young Professionals: This is a program to help industry professionals in the tech, non-tech, and management domains achieve their career objectives by providing them guidance from experienced mentors from across the world.

For Early-Stage Entrepreneurs: This is a program for startups where we help founders and their management teams in building, refining, and executing their business strategy and monitoring and giving guidance so that they can achieve their objectives.

2. With what mission and objectives, the company was set up? In short, tell us about your journey since the inception of the company?

We started MentorKart with a mission to reduce the academia-industry gap and make the youth, and the industry future-ready with the help of mentorship from experienced industry mentors and coaches. Since our inception, we have already partnered with more than 50+ universities across the country and intend to achieve the goal of reaching 200+ campuses in the next few quarters. We also provide mentorship to a lot of young professionals and startup entrepreneurs and their key team members. We today have more than 500 mentors and thousands of mentees on our platform.

3. Mention some of the awards, achievements, recognitions, and clients' feedback that you feel are notable and valuable for the company.

So far, we've collaborated with 50+ universities such as Noida International University, DIT University, Roorkee Institute of Technology, IES University, and other renowned universities. We have a student base of over 75,000. To date, we have received total funding of $360,000 and are backed by well-known angel investors such as Startup Buddy, Lets Venture, and several HNIs.

4. How do you see the company and the industry in the future ahead?  

Mentorship is an investment that shapes the future of a person and helps in developing new skill sets and strengths of an individual. A mentor motivates and provides skills and emotional support to youth – be it students, young professionals, or startup entrepreneurs – and helps them achieve their goals. In addition, specifically for students and young professionals, having additional skills advance their career and open various new job opportunities as well. Programs such as Business Analytics, digital marketing, Machine Learning, and Cloud computing are the skills that are ruling the current market, and for years when India will become a global hub of emerging technology, the demand for skilled professionals will increase at the same pace.

MentorKart is a 360-degree skill development platform that is ultimately mapped with youth's career aspirations, such as being employed, developing leadership skills, or becoming their own boss. We've had remarkable growth in recent years and will continue to provide our best services.

5. What are your growth plans for the next 12 months? 

We are today at the cusp of growth and have aggressive expansion plans to onboard lots of universities & institutes across India and launch more programs that will help students, young professionals, and entrepreneurs.

6. Kindly brief us about your role at Edtech platform – MentorKart and your journey in this highly promising sector.

As I mentioned earlier, in my two years with the MentorKart, we've assisted a large number of people with professional assistance. I'm also a certified life coach with over 25 years of experience in successful business leadership, including developing, building, and implementing business solutions and products in the field of information technology and services for customers in more than 20 countries.

7. What is your Leadership Mantra?

My leadership mantra is about just one thing – making the youth of India industry and future-ready, to ensure India become the skill capital for the world, empowering Youth to be the leader of the future.