Hi, I am Ravi Handa and I run an online cat coaching course via my website www.handakafunda.com .Although I started the course in early 2013, I have been involved in the CAT coaching space since I got out of college in 2006. I have seen my fair share of candidates trying their hand at CAT coaching and that prompted me to pick this up as the topic for the blogpost when Rohan invited me to write on the IIMRaipur blog.
A lot of CAT aspirants enjoy solving problems that they encounter while they are preparing for CAT. This is especially true for the ones who are good at it and eventually make it to an IIM. This gives them the impression that they would enjoy being on the other side as well i.e. teaching those concepts in a class or for a coaching institute / website of their own. There is no doubt it is a great field to get into if that is what you really want to do. Having an IIM tag (or for that matter any good B-school) will make it easier for you to break in as well. But the bigger question is – should you do it? I will try to put forward some realities of the CAT coaching sector which as an aspirant you may or may not have understood while you were attending the classes.
Broadly
speaking, there are two ways that you can be involved in the CAT Coaching
industry:
a) Content
b) Business
In the content mode of working, you can join
one of the established coaching institutes. You will get paid either a per-hour
rate or an annual salary. With no prior experience and an IIM tag (or a top
B-school) you will start with around 1000 Rs. per hour / 10 LPA sort of
package. Sounds good, right? Well, it is good in the beginning. The problem
happens once you have spent couple of years doing this. The problem becomes a
lot bigger if you have been doing it for 5 years. While in any other sector,
your remuneration grows significantly year on year; it would be extremely
difficult for the same to happen here. Also, there is a problem with the number
of hours you will actually get to teach. It is unlikely to go beyond 1200 hours
per year even in the best of scenarios.
The business mode, gives you better returns
but it comes with its own set of risks. You can get into the game by either
starting up your own coaching company or take a franchise of one of the
established brands. If you end up starting your own coaching company (online or
offline), the amount of time you will spend teaching (which is probably the
reason you got into it in the first place) would be minimal. It will be like
starting any other company – most of your time would go into fire fighting and
dealing with the struggles of entrepreneurship. Even if it is a franchise, it
will be still like an entrepreneurship but you will have an investor / boss on
your head who would ask you about the number of enrolments / sales revenue and
not the number of classes that you took. The financial returns here can be
enormous but they will more be governed by your ability to run a business and
less by your ability / interest in teaching.
If you have
reached till here, then you might be wondering – why does anyone do it? A lot
of them start doing it under the false illusion that it will be lucrative and /
or it will be easy. That is the reason a lot of them quit after the first two
three years. The ones who stick around are the ones who really enjoy teaching.
It is not a good financial decision but if you can look beyond the monetary aspect
– there can be few careers for an MBA grad that can be more rewarding. The
immense joy that you get in helping someone out is hard to be replicated by
money. CAT coaching gives you the opportunity to feel that high on a daily
basis. So, if you want to do this – do not do it for the money but do it for
the love of teaching.
