How Swapnil Kamat is helping professionals 'Work Better'

With an MBA in marketing and a successful stint with reputed brands like L’Oreal brands like Garnier Fructis, Nutrice and Multi Lights, Swapnil Kamat realised his calling in the field of Training and People Development at a very early stage in his career. He, along with his wife Ruchira Karnik, eventually decided to kick-start Work Better Training in 2008 to deal with the aggravation associated with corporate training.

“We had been a part of a lot of executive training programmes and realised that most of them were theoretical and boring in nature. There was a huge disconnect between what was taught in the classroom and what was happening on the ground. Hence, I along with my wife Ruchira co-founded Work Better Training with the endeavour of making ‘Corporate Training’ programmes more real, practical and implementable,” shares Kamat.

Ever since, Kamat has managed to challenge the way corporate trainings are looked at, by focusing on behavioural and soft-skills domain.

Kamat’s tryst with entrepreneurship

Hailing from a business family, Kamat shares that every member of his family is an entrepreneur. His parents have their own family IT business, which inculcated the spirit of entrepreneurship in him since childhood. At an early age of 15, he started taking care of the sales department of his family business. “Early on in my life, I was clear that I wanted to become an entrepreneur at some point,” reminisces Kamat.

He started his entrepreneurial journey way back in college by setting up an event company. This was his first individual venture, but he tells that his first serious venture was a travel portal –trip2goa.com. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out well. The failure wrecked him, both financially and emotionally. But, he eventually overcame that phase and managed to bounce back with his family’s support.

Establishment of Work Better

Work Better was founded with an objective to address several boring, theoretical and irrelevant training programmes in respective corporate jobs. The question that ‘if learning is such an integral part of professional development and organisations’ progress, then why it can’t be done better?’ This led the co-founders do a thorough research and launch Work Better Training to deliver effective corporate training programmes.

The key objective is to fundamentally change the way executive training programmes are delivered in India and help professionals ‘Work Better’. Work Better Training is one of the growing executive education and training firm. It offers customised training solutions in soft skills, behaviour and management domain.

Since its inception half a decade ago, the firm has partnered with some of the biggest organisations on their people development initiatives and trained over 75,000 executives across India. “Practical, real and implementable – these 3 words define a Work Better programme. We have created a huge impact through our holistic approach, which involves doing extensive groundwork, creating customised content, conducting training on adult learning principles and engaging participants through post programme tools,” asserts Kamat.

The firm has a dedicated content team, which invests its time and effort in researching, creating various techniques and analysing what module will work best in which format. Besides, the team work towards engaging and involving participants, via online and mobile learning, for another 6 months even after the participants complete their classroom workshop.

Currently, Work Better is a self-funded venture, but Kamat shares that a lot of blue chip investors are showing keen interest in his venture, after analysing the growth potential and profit of the company.

Achievements

Work better has so far trained over 30,000 executives across India’s leading companies that equipped and empowered them to become effective professionals.  Being a training consultant, the company designs major training and people development initiatives for some of the renowned companies like – HDFC Bank, IndusInd Bank, NSE, Essar Group, BNP Paribas, etc. Kamat has also been featured on CNBC Young Turks as one of ’India’s Young Achievers’.

Enabling firms to get right talent

Finding the right talent is always a challenge for a big or small company. Work Better addresses this issue with a team of 14 people and 97 empanelled trainers that deliver training programmes. “We have managed to bring a great team together because of the importance we lay on hiring and creating the right company culture. It’s as tough to get into Work Better Training as it would be to get into a top 4 consultancy.  We are extremely careful about who comes into our family. Joining our team is like marrying us. Therefore, we put a lot of thought and effort into it,” points Kamat.