Top News

Picture a conference room done up like an F1 pit lane, checkered flags and all, with more than 330 working professionals, entrepreneurs and career switchers packed in for a single day. That was Rebuild Your Life – F1 Racing Edition, hosted on August 9 at The Lalit in Mumbai by Ira Skillsand it wasn’t built to hand out swag or certificates. It was built around a bet: that in a job market being reshaped by AI, the professionals who win are the ones who treat every career setback like a pit stop, not a crash.

That bet sits at the core of everything Ira Skills does. The company was started by Deven Pandeyan entrepreneur who has built a public identity as India’s Active Income Coach, on a premise that sounds simple until you look at how the rest of the education industry operates: a course only matters if it changes what a person can actually do afterward.

Ira Skills, by the numbers

• 5 lakh+ learners across working professionals and aspiring entrepreneurs
• 55,000+ Google reviews, averaging roughly 4.8 stars
• Course lineup: Artificial Intelligence, Advanced Excel, Power BI, SQL, data analytics, career development and skill monetisation
• Operating philosophy: K2I, or Knowledge to Income
• Latest offline event: Rebuild Your Life – F1 Racing Edition, The Lalit, Mumbai, August 9, 330+ attendees

A pit stop, not a graduation

Deven leans on the F1 metaphor deliberately. A pit crew doesn’t celebrate the car for surviving the race so far; it makes rapid, targeted changes and sends the driver back out faster than before. That’s how he wants professionals to think about a career slump or a skills gap, not as a permanent state, but as a fixable pause. The Mumbai event ran attendees through sessions on AI, career strategy and building multiple income streams, all pitched through that same lens: speed and adaptability now count for more than years of tenure.

“This is not just an event. It is a movement to help working professionals rebuild their careers, confidence and income through AI and future-ready skills.”

Deven Pandey, Founder, Ira Skills

It also signals something about where Ira Skills is headed. Its 5 lakh-plus learner base was built almost entirely online. A packed ballroom in Mumbai suggests the company is now testing whether the same K2I message lands even harder in person, city by city.

The metric Ira Skills actually cares about

Ask most edtech companies how they’re doing and you’ll get enrolment counts and completion rates. Ira Skills argues that both numbers are close to meaningless on their own, because neither tells you whether a learner’s life changed. Internally, the company tracks a five-step chain instead: Learn, Implement, Build Capability, Create Value, Generate Outcomes. A course that doesn’t move a learner through that entire chain, in Deven’s framing, hasn’t really done its job.

What that looks like varies by person. Sometimes it’s someone getting sharper at the job they already hold. Sometimes it’s a raise or a promotion. And for a growing number of learners, Ira Skills says, it’s the first paying client of a freelance or consulting practice, or a side income that didn’t exist before the course.

“A certificate hanging on the wall cannot be the final outcome of education. The real question is: what can the student do today that they couldn’t do before learning?”

Deven Pandey, Founder and CEO, Ira Skills

K2I: the acronym driving the strategy

K2I, short for Knowledge to Income, is Deven’s shorthand for a gap he thinks India has never properly addressed. The country is full of professionals sitting on a decade or two of hard-won, industry-specific knowledge, with no idea how to turn it into a second revenue stream, a promotion case, or a business of their own. Nobody taught them how to package or sell what they already know. Ira Skills is positioning itself as the company that teaches that translation.

He’s got a one-liner for it that comes up in nearly every conversation: “Information nahi, implementation chahiye.” In other words, not information, we need implementation.

Teaching AI as a skill multiplier, not a subject

The rise of AI is the reason Deven thinks this shift can’t wait. Ira Skills isn’t treating AI as a standalone course to bolt onto its catalogue. Instead, it’s building AI use directly into how professionals already analyse data, automate repetitive work and hunt for opportunities in their own fields. Alongside that, the company is doubling down on the things AI still can’t do well: communicating clearly, solving ambiguous problems, advising clients, and making business judgment calls.

Deven’s argument is that simply knowing how to prompt an AI tool isn’t a durable skill. The real differentiator over the next decade, he says, will be professionals who use AI to produce measurably more economic value than they could without it. That thesis is a big part of why Ira Skills has built a reputation as one of the more prominent names in India’s AI upskilling space.

Does it actually work?

Numbers aside, Ira Skills leans on individual stories to make its case: learners who’ve used its programs as leverage for a new job, a salary negotiation, or a freelance practice launched on the side. Deven argues these one-off wins, multiplied across hundreds of thousands of learners, are a more honest scorecard for K2I than any completion rate.

Marks, jobs, value: Deven’s three eras of Indian education

Deven breaks down India’s education evolution into three stages. Education 1.0, in his telling, was about scoring marks. Education 2.0 was about converting a degree into a job. He thinks the country is now entering Education 3.0, a phase where the ability to keep learning and keep creating value, on an ongoing basis, matters more than any single qualification ever did. As AI resets what both employment and entrepreneurship look like, he expects this third phase to define the next ten years.

“My dream is not simply to build a large EdTech company. My dream is to contribute to changing how India defines education: from marks to mastery, from certificates to capability, and from information to implementation.”

Deven Pandey, Founder and CEO, Ira Skills

Today, Ira Skills says it has crossed 5 lakh learners and run programs with hundreds of corporate and institutional partners, layering career development, communication training, personal finance and income-generation skills on top of its technical courses.

“When education starts creating capability, capability starts creating confidence. And when that capability creates value for somebody else, income becomes an outcome.”

Deven Pandey, Founder and CEO, Ira Skills

Whether that formula holds at scale is something only time, and a lot more learner outcomes, will prove. But it’s the bet Ira Skills has placed, and it’s the one it’s asking the rest of India’s edtech industry to place alongside it.

About Ira Skills

Ira Skills is one of India’s leading AI upskilling institutions, founded by Deven Pandey, widely known as India’s Active Income Coach. Its learning ecosystem focuses on AI, data analytics, professional skills, career growth and knowledge-to-income capabilities, with an emphasis on practical implementation and measurable learner outcomes.