Rise of EdTech Industry in India – Jobs and Career Paths

The rise of EdTech in India: jobs and career paths

Everyone keeps telling you EdTech is dead. The headlines from 2022 onward made it sound like the whole sector had been a sugar high and now came the crash, the layoffs, the down rounds, the shuttered apps. And yet here we are, in 2026, and Indian families are still buying courses, students are still sitting in front of screens with a teacher in another city, and people are still being hired to make all of that run. So which is it. Dead, or just done pretending to be a rocket ship?

Both, more or less. The boom was real and the bust was real, and the part that survived both is the part worth taking seriously as a place to build a career. That’s the bit nobody puts in a headline because it doesn’t fit either story.

What annoys me about most career advice on this subject is that it treats EdTech as one thing. It isn’t. A content writer at a test-prep platform, a backend engineer keeping a live class from buffering for forty thousand kids at once, and an inside-sales caller working a Sunday-evening shift are all “in EdTech” and have almost nothing in common, including how safe their jobs are. So if you’re going to spend years of your working life here, the question isn’t whether to join EdTech. It’s which corner of it, and whether that corner is still standing in three years.

I don’t have a clean answer. Nobody does, and you should be suspicious of anyone who claims to. But there’s a fair bit you can actually reason about, so let’s go through it.

the companies, and what’s actually going on with them

People want a ranking. Best company to join, second best, and so on, neatly numbered. I can’t give you that and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise, because the answer depends entirely on which role you’re after and how much risk you can stomach. What I can do is tell you roughly where each of the big names sits right now, and where I’d be cautious.

BYJU’S

You already know this story, probably. Everyone reaches for it as the cautionary tale. At its peak BYJU’S was valued at something north of twenty billion dollars and was treated like the centrepiece of where Indian education was supposedly headed. Then came the financial mess, the regulatory scrutiny, the restructuring, and waves of layoffs that put thousands of people out of work. Where it lands from here is genuinely up in the air. It still has employees, it still has products, but I’d think very hard before treating it as a stable place to plant a career right now. To be fair, plenty of capable people built good careers there before it wobbled, and the skills they picked up didn’t evaporate when the valuation did. So it’s not that the experience is worthless. The worry is that the runway underneath you is the thing I’d want to understand before signing anything.

Unacademy

Unacademy is in a steadier spot, and the reason is fairly simple. Competitive exam prep is not a fad. There will be UPSC aspirants and JEE aspirants and people grinding for state-level exams next year and the year after, regardless of what the funding climate does. Much of the company got built around individual educators, the popular-teacher-as-the-product model, and once a teacher has a following that’s annoyingly hard for a competitor to copy. They had their own cuts, like everyone did. But the core test-prep business has something underneath it, which is more than you can say for a lot of the sector. Out of Bangalore, with the usual scatter of metro offices. If I had to point at the most boringly durable of the big names, it’s probably this one, with “durable” carrying its usual asterisk in a business this volatile.

PhysicsWallah

This is the one I find genuinely interesting, and not in a vague way. PhysicsWallah started as Alakh Pandey teaching physics on YouTube, free, to kids who couldn’t afford coaching. That turned into a company, and in 2022 it became India’s 101st unicorn, which is a faintly absurd sentence to write about a YouTube channel. The bit that makes it worth watching is the offline push. They’ve been opening physical centres, the Vidyapeeth network, in tier-2 and tier-3 cities rather than just chasing metro screens. So it’s part app, part old-fashioned coaching chain, and that hybrid shape changes who gets hired. It isn’t only engineers and content people in Bangalore. It’s teachers, centre managers, and counsellors in Jaipur, Patna, Lucknow, Bhopal, places that the pure-online players mostly skipped.

Whether that offline bet is clever or reckless, I honestly can’t tell you yet. Opening real buildings full of real staff across the country is expensive and slow and hard to unwind if it doesn’t work. The early signs read positive. But “early signs read positive” is what people said about half the companies that later imploded, so I’d hold that one loosely.

Vedantu

Vedantu got into live online tutoring early, built its own platform for it, the WAVE thing, and for a while looked like a serious contender. Then the market turned and it had to shrink, hard. It’s still around, still doing live-learning work, but smaller than its peak-hype self. I bring it up mostly for one type of person: if you’re an engineer or a product designer who actually wants to work on the guts of live streaming at scale, the low-latency, many-people-at-once problem, there’s interesting work in that space and Vedantu is one of the places that’s been wrestling with it for years. As a general “should I join” question, it’s a smaller bet than it once was.

UpGrad

UpGrad is playing a different game entirely, and I think it’s worth understanding why that matters. Instead of K-12 kids, it goes after working adults, upskilling and career-switch programmes, often badged with IITs, IIMs, MICA, or universities abroad. Why this segment feels sturdier than children’s tutoring comes down to who’s paying and why. A working adult, or that adult’s employer, spends money on a course with a fairly concrete goal: a promotion, a switch, a raise. That’s clearer purchase intent than a parent half-hoping an app fixes their kid’s marks. Sizeable teams sit inside the company doing learner support, career services, and corporate and institutional partnerships, so the roles aren’t only academic. The adult-education market has its own problems, but it doesn’t depend on the same shaky economics as a lot of consumer EdTech.

the actual jobs, which are not equally safe

Now to the part that should matter most to you and somehow always gets the least honest treatment. The role you take decides almost everything: your pay, your stress, and, the part people skip, how stuck you’d be if the company folded under you. Some of these jobs travel beautifully to other industries. Others don’t budge an inch. Pay ranges in this sector swing wildly depending on the company’s funding and the city you’re in, and then on top of that, how well you negotiate, so I’m going to talk about the shape of each role rather than pretend I can hand you a precise number that means anything.

content and curriculum

Content is the spine of the whole business. Scripts for videos, study notes, practice questions, assessments, the interactive bits, all of it has to be written by someone, and every single EdTech company needs a lot of it. Curriculum design sits a step above that, building the order things get taught in and mapping it onto exam patterns or job requirements. Entry-level writing pays modestly. Deep subject expertise in a high-demand area like JEE physics or UPSC general studies pays a great deal more, and a handful of star educators on platforms like Unacademy have made genuinely large sums through revenue sharing, though that’s the rare top of a very long tail, not the normal outcome.

The question I’d actually ask about a content job is how it holds up against AI, because that’s the thing that should worry you, not the starting salary. Churning out basic explanatory text is already being half-automated. Designing a real curriculum, or writing at the level of someone who deeply knows a subject, that’s safe for a good while yet. Writing the four-hundredth practice question for Class 8 science? I wouldn’t bet my next decade on a machine leaving that one alone.

technology and product

The engineering problems here are better than people assume. Keeping a live class smooth for tens of thousands of concurrent viewers with low latency is a hard distributed-systems problem. Building an adaptive engine that actually adjusts to a student instead of pretending to is hard. Interactive simulations, the same. This is real work, not CRUD-app filler. Junior developers earn solidly, senior engineers a fair bit more, and product managers and data scientists at the well-funded places can do very well, especially the data folks working on adaptive learning who come in with strong research or IIT backgrounds.

The thing I actually want you to take away, though: tech roles in EdTech are the most portable jobs in the sector by a distance. If the company dies tomorrow, an engineer’s skills walk straight into fintech or e-commerce or anything else. That portability is itself a form of safety, and it’s worth weighing as heavily as the pay when you’re staring at the risk side of a job offer.

online teaching

This one’s a genuine structural shift, not marketing. A brilliant teacher in a small town in Rajasthan used to be able to reach the few hundred kids who walked through the door. Now the same person can reach lakhs. That’s new, and it created a job category that didn’t exist a generation ago.

But don’t romanticise it. Teaching through a screen is harder than teaching in a room, because you can’t read forty faces and you can’t feel when you’ve lost them. You have to hold attention through a camera, be comfortable with the tech, build slides, and basically perform for hours at a stretch. The educators who do best are subject experts who also happen to be entertainers and, frankly, brand-builders, which is a rare combination and not one most teachers signed up for. A popular online educator earns a multiple of what a school teacher does, and the very top tier, the ones with huge followings, can earn enormous amounts. Here’s the catch though: that distribution is brutally skewed. Most online teachers earn fairly ordinary money. It’s a power law, a few win big and a long tail doesn’t, and there’s no reliable way to know in advance which one you’ll be.

sales and business development

This is the part of EdTech that gets the most flak, and a lot of it is deserved. Anything sold on a subscription or course-purchase model needs people to do the selling, and the titles dress it up, Business Development Associate, Inside Sales Executive, Education Counsellor, but the job is converting leads into paying customers. It can be decent work; you are, at the better end, genuinely helping someone get access to education. At the worse end it turns grim: aggressive targets, punishing hours in peak season, and a high-pressure floor culture that some of these companies became notorious for. So before you take a sales seat, do the homework. Find people who work there or recently left and ask them plainly what the targets and the hours are like. That conversation tells you more than any glassdoor average.

On money: the base tends to be low and the incentives are where it gets interesting, doubling or tripling total pay for someone who actually hits numbers. Managers earn more, and senior leaders at the VP level do genuinely well. Whether the day-to-day is worth it is a question only you can answer, but go in with your eyes open about what the work actually is.

marketing and growth

EdTech companies pour money into marketing, performance ads on Google and Meta, content, SEO, influencer deals. Growth roles lean analytical, lots of experiments and reading data and killing the things that don’t work. And like engineering, these skills aren’t EdTech-specific at all. A growth marketer who’s good at it can move to any consumer-tech company without breaking stride, which once again is the kind of portability I’d value highly in a sector this jumpy.

the skills that seem to carry across all of it

A few things keep mattering regardless of which role you land in, and they’re not the ones job ads usually list.

First, actually understanding India’s education system, which sounds too obvious to mention and is missing far more often than you’d think. Central boards, the various state boards each with their own curriculum, the national and state competitive exams, the alphabet soup of regulators (UGC, AICTE, NMC, BCI), the National Education Policy of 2020. It’s a genuinely tangled system, and the people who understand how it actually fits together have an edge over the ones who don’t, in pretty much every role.

Second, basic comfort with technology even when your job isn’t technical. Learning-management platforms, video tools, a bit of data analysis, the usual Slack-Notion-Jira machinery. Nobody’s asking a counsellor to code, but the ones who freeze at a spreadsheet struggle.

Third, and this one’s growing fast, language. Vernacular content in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati is in short supply and high demand. If you’re fluent in a regional language and you actually know a subject, that pairing is worth more every year, because the supply of people who can do both is thin.

And fourth, a head for numbers, or at least a willingness to live with them. Completion rates, engagement, conversion funnels, satisfaction scores. The whole industry runs on these, and people who flinch at them tend not to last.

government platforms, slow but not nothing

It’s easy to forget the public side because it doesn’t run loud ad campaigns, but it’s quietly large. SWAYAM puts free courses from places like the IITs and IIMs online and ties them into academic credit. NPTEL, the IIT-IISc effort, has become one of the more respected supplementary resources for engineering students, the sort of thing people actually recommend rather than just cite. DIKSHA carries school content in a stack of Indian languages. And the proposed National Digital University could, if it actually launches, open up a whole ecosystem for online higher education.

These create jobs directly, content people, technical staff, exam coordinators, and they shape the sector indirectly by setting standards and building the habit of learning online in the first place. The pace is slower than a venture-funded startup, no question. But the reach is often far bigger, and the ground underneath is steadier, which counts for something if stability is what you’re after.

the problems, and they’re not small

I’d be doing you a disservice to make this sound clean, so here are the things that genuinely worry me about the sector.

Quality versus scale. Teaching one person well is hard. Doing it for a million people at once, through a screen, is brutally hard, and a lot of companies quietly gave up on the second half of that sentence and just chased user counts instead. The ones that eventually crack the actual-learning problem will probably win. Whoever keeps optimising for sign-ups over outcomes is, I suspect, living on borrowed time.

Regulation that hasn’t settled. How EdTech should be regulated, what consumer protections apply, how data privacy works when the users are children, none of this is decided. And the answers, when they come, could rewrite business models overnight. That’s not a hypothetical; aggressive sales practices already drew enough heat to force changes once.

Money that was never real. A frightening number of these companies ran for years on venture capital with no honest path to profit. So when you’re looking at an offer, look past the logo. Some famous brand bleeding cash is a worse bet than a quieter company that actually makes money, and the name on the door tells you nothing about which one you’re walking into.

The divide nobody fully solved. A lot of students, especially in rural areas, still don’t have reliable internet or a decent device. Whoever figures out genuinely good low-bandwidth or offline-capable learning, or community models that don’t assume a smartphone per child, is working on one of the few problems in this space that actually matters. That’s where I’d want to be, if meaning is part of what you’re optimising for.

where things seem to be heading

Predictions are mostly noise, so take these as directions rather than forecasts.

The obvious one is AI in the classroom: adaptive platforms, automated doubt-solving, auto-grading, tutoring systems that try to respond to the individual student. Money is pouring into it, and that part is real. What it does to jobs is the murky bit. It’ll spin up new roles, people who train these systems, people who shape AI-generated educational content, while quietly hollowing out others like basic writing and simple assessment-building. On balance I lean toward net positive for EdTech employment over the medium term. But I hold that loosely and would not be shocked to be wrong.

Then there’s the regional-language story, which I keep coming back to because the numbers are stark. India recognises 22 languages officially and decent online education barely exists in most of them. That gap is enormous, and it’s only now starting to fill, which keeps opening work for content creators, translators, voice artists, and teachers who can work in something other than English or Hindi.

Quieter but maybe steadier is the corporate side. Companies training their own staff through these platforms, the B2B business, looks like it’s outgrowing the consumer side, and the economics behind it make more sense: a company pays, expects a measurable return, and renews if it gets one. UpGrad for Business, Coursera for Business, Simplilearn all live here. Less glamorous corner, more sustainable one.

And there’s the overseas push. Indian EdTech firms are eyeing Southeast Asia, the Middle East, parts of Africa, which creates work for people who can adapt content and strategy to a different market. It’s early though, the kind of early where half the bets won’t pay off, so I’d file it under “watch” rather than “bet on” for now.

how you actually get in

If you’re a fresh graduate, the first job is to figure out which corner of this you even want, because the entry paths diverge fast. A B.Tech from a solid college points naturally at the tech and product roles. An education or psychology background fits content and curriculum. And don’t turn your nose up at sales as a way in; it’s the easiest door to get through and it hands you real industry exposure quickly, even if it isn’t where you stay.

If you’re already a few years into a career somewhere else, your skills probably transfer further than you assume. Marketing experience from an FMCG company maps over. Engineering from a TCS-type background maps over. Ten years of classroom teaching is, honestly, more relevant than most people with ten years of classroom teaching realise. The work is mostly in describing what you’ve done in language that connects to what EdTech needs, rather than acquiring some new credential.

And for anyone, regardless of stage: making educational content on YouTube, writing about education, helping out an education-focused NGO, picking up some instructional design, any of it shows you actually care about this rather than just chasing the next hot sector. That genuine-interest signal does more than people expect, partly because so few applicants bother to send it.

a rough word on pay

I’ve avoided throwing exact rupee figures around because they’d be falsely precise, and a number you trust too much is worse than no number. So treat this directionally. Content and entry-level roles sit at the lower end. Engineering and product climb steeply with experience, and the senior end at well-funded companies can get genuinely high. Online educators are all over the map, modest for most and extraordinary for the rare few. Sales lives on incentives more than base. Senior leadership in any of these tracks pays what senior leadership tends to pay. What actually moves your number is the company’s funding, the city, and how well you negotiate, far more than the job title printed on the offer letter.

what I’d keep an eye on

I’m not going to pretend I know where Indian EdTech sits in five years. But if I were watching for signs, a few things would tell me more than the rest.

Whether BYJU’S steadies or keeps sliding, because that single outcome will set how much appetite investors have for the whole sector. Does PhysicsWallah’s offline gamble actually work at scale? That’s the real-world test of whether the hybrid model holds up. AI is the next one to watch, specifically whether it ends up replacing content jobs or just speeding them up, because that lands directly on the biggest employment category in the field. Then there’s the National Digital University, and the open question of whether it ever properly launches and what standards it drags into place. Regional-language EdTech is another, because nobody really knows yet if it takes off the way the Hindi and English markets did. And the one I care about most: whether any company finally proves, at scale and not in a press release, that its students genuinely learn more than they would have without it.

That last one is the whole game. Whoever can answer it convincingly won’t just win the market, they’ll have built something that actually deserves to exist, and the people who worked on it will have done something worth doing. Whether that company is already out there or hasn’t been started yet, I genuinely couldn’t tell you.