Baramulla girl’s online startup aims to promote IT skills

Srinagar: Mehvish Irshad Kirmani, a freelance web designer and programmer from north Kashmir Baramulla district, aims to equip youth with job-oriented IT skills.

A recent pass-out from the University of Kashmir’s Computer Science Department, Mehvish has started ‘Eyeacademica’, an edu-tech startup aiming to provide online courses and IT-driven skills to make youth well versed with the growing trends of the world of IT.

“After completing my Master’s in Computer Application in 2020, I was looking for online IT courses to enhance my skills and equip myself for the job market. To my surprise, there was no indigenous platform in Kashmir to provide such courses online.

This is how the idea came into being. I collaborated with various companies to provide IT-related courses and online workshops to students in Kashmir.

There are many students who can’t afford to pay hefty fees or go outside J&K to pursue these courses, and my platform is aimed to provide them with the same platform,” Mehvish said.

In 2021, Mehvish started the platform alone by developing a website for the startup, and soon students started to register on the platform.

She said that they collaborated with IT experts from across India who provided these courses on their platforms.

“I am freelancing and developing websites for various clients. This helped me to start this platform as I had enough expertise to start a venture like this. Due to my family responsibilities, I couldn’t go outside the state, and I am sure that there are many students who face the same issue, and I wanted to make it easy for them,” she said.

Mehvish said that she wanted to create a platform that would work the way big platforms like BYJU’s does on a large scale.

She said that initially, she thought of providing courses for up to 12th class students, but given the huge coaching centre availability for such medical and non-med courses, she thought of sticking to her own IT field.

“I want to make this platform a source of job-ready courses, technical courses, web development courses, digital marketing courses, and other skill-based courses. In addition to this, there will be courses on competitive exams,” Mehvish added. She said that the response had been good, and that was why they had started to develop a mobile application for the platform and decided to enhance the website too.

“After we got a better response, we are currently busy enhancing the website and developing the app, which will be ready in less than a month. The students will have easy access to our courses, workshops, and other academic courses after they register,” Mehvish said.

She said that she wanted to provide career-counseling courses through her platform so that students, instead of sticking to a few jobs, would look beyond.

Mehvish said that her platform would collaborate with the best experts and also rope in various companies to provide the best IT-related courses to students that will have value in the job market.

“My future plan is to connect with schools so that young students become skilled and grow their interest in the IT field. I want to provide youngsters with options beyond medical and non-medical fields so that they can be the best software engineers and IT experts,” she said.

The young programmer also said that through her startup, she wanted to give education to students who come from financially weak backgrounds.

She said that her aim would be to provide job placement to those students who will do these IT courses through her platform.