-Paromita Sengupta (Bengaluru)

Singh: soft skills evaluation focus

Gurugram-based entrepreneur Nirmal Singh is co-founder-CEO of Wheebox (estb.2011), a subsidiary of the US-based Educational Testing Service (ETS) — a global provider of AI-integrated proctored online assessment services to measure the competencies and skills of shortlisted job applicants for industry and business enterprises. Over the past 13 years, Wheebox with its unique subscriptions-based business model, has signed up 500-plus private and public corporations in India and the Middle East as clients.

Wheebox also offers remote proctoring services to K-12 schools and higher education institutions to conduct fair examinations. The firm’s Global Employability Test (GET) is designed to assess college graduates’ readiness for employment while a clutch of standardised recruitment tests including the Baro Career Interest Test, Leadership Competency Index, SALT 4 and MAP 9PF among others assess and certify job applicants for large and mid-size companies.

Newspeg. Last September, Wheebox was acquired by ETS based in Princeton, New Jersey (USA). ETS bills itself as the world’s largest not-for-profit assessments company operational in 180 countries. Among its proprietorial tests: TOEFL, GRE, TOEIC and Praxis.

History. A science alum of Mumbai University, Singh started his career in sales and marketing at NIIT Ltd in 1998. After 13 years of work experience in several companies, he quit corporate life in 2011 and together with his UK-based school mate Pawan Kumar, raised several rounds of funding from Lumis Partners, PeopleStrong and Multiples Alternate Asset Management Fund to promote Wheebox (Web and Hybrid Electronic Examinations Box).

Direct talk. “Over the past two decades, skills evaluation has undergone a sea change from assessing only hard to soft skills as well. Globally, employers have awoken to the huge importance of life skills such as communication, social adaptability and learning agility. We have been in the vanguard of this shift towards evaluating soft as well as hard skills in India. Our popular National Employability Test, recently renamed the Global Employability Test, conducted for 1.2 million Indian graduates prior to entering the jobs market, assesses communication, problem solving, logical thinking, and a host of other soft and hard skills,” says Singh.

“To raise awareness among job seekers, education institutions, industry associations, employers and policy makers about the specific skill requirements across industry sectors and provide a data-driven analysis of India’s workforce, we also publish an annual India Skills Report in collaboration with All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), Association of Indian Universities (AIU), PeopleStrong HR, Taggd, Google, State Skill Development missions, and Sector Skill Councils,” he adds.

Future plans. Following its recent acquisition by ETS, Wheebox plans to enter the US recruitment market to enable large and medium-scale enterprise customers to acquire high quality talent. “We also plan to partner with higher education institutions and edtech companies to deliver remote proctoring services and introduce our standardised tests — Compass 8PF, Insight 360 (aptitude test) — in the US market,” says Singh.

Testing times ahead!

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