Simmering ideas on Skills, Technology, Entrepreneurship & Workplace
Hello, I’m Nikhil Gumbhir
I am an entrepreneur and experience curator. I have been working in the education technology industry for over a decade. As part of my career, I founded ‘Cloud Mentor’; a hands-on STEM initiative helping 50K high school children get curious about their future jobs. Further, I have helped create ‘nLearn’; a digital testing and learning product impacting 500K learners. In my current avatar as Chief Operations Officer, I am creating India’s largest adult learner engagement playbook for ‘Harappa’; an online institution scaling 21st century social, cognitive & behavioural skills to help working professionals adapt to the future of work. I am an ‘imagineer’ with an MBA from the Indian School of Business (ISB) and an innovation fellowship from Stanford. I love reading in yellow lit cafes, and have authored a DIY book for kids called ‘Become a Junior Inventor’.
What’s stewing?
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Skills
The world has never changed as fast as it’s changing now. The half-life of a skill has shrunk to 3 years. How do we go about learning and building a skills portfolio for this new world of work? How do we think about educating our youth so they’re ready to hit the ground running when they join their work?
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Technology
The world has lived in a technology trap for most of it’s history. There is a fine line between labor enabling technology, and labor replacing technology. With Automation and AI, we are going through the fourth industrial revolution with palpable tension between humans and machines, a moment eerily similar to the first industrial revolution. How can humans reframe AI to embrace technology as a colleague?
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Entrepreneurship
It’s never been a better time to be an entrepreneur. The internet has made it possible for anyone with an idea to launch a product at the skip of a heartbeat. Today, capital is not a competitive advantage. A good entrepreneur is. What are the mental models that entrepreneurs can use to realise their untapped potential?
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Workplace
We’ve gone from being hunter gatherers to farmers, explorers to factory labourers, and computer tinkerers to knowledge workers. In all of this our workplace has been transformed from forests and trees in nature, to cubicles in high rise buildings (and now also at home). The Covid 19 pandemic has forced everyone to rethink their purpose at work. What is work? Why do we need to work and what makes a conducive workplace?