BYLCx Launches A New Platform With 25 Online Courses, Aims To Focus On 21st Century Skills

Bangladesh Youth Leadership Center (BYLC)’s online learning academy, BYLCx, unveiled its revamped digital learning platform and 25 courses in a launch event held at Lakeshore Hotel Yesterday. Tailored for the Bangladeshi youth, BYLCx offers specialized online courses that can help build essential skills required for effective leadership, professional development, and other in-demand 21st century skills.

Speaking at the event, Ejaj Ahmad, Founder and President of BYLC said, “Drawing on our nearly 10 years of teaching leadership, we launched BYLCx to make our courses widely accessible to youth from all corners of Bangladesh and help them prepare for the challenges of the 21st-century workplace.”

FS Takeaway:

• BYLCx is not an online leadership training program. It is not an extension of BYLC's existing programs.  In fact, with BYLCx, BYLC has entered the broader education market with a rather sophisticated strategy. It is a major departure from BYLC's existing leadership-focused education offering. BYLCx will go beyond leadership and mainly focus on professional development of young people with a special focus on employability skills
• Aims to address the challenges of youth unemployment, the skills gap in the market, and the uncertain future of employment by offering education on 21st-Century Skills
• The platform has 25 live courses at this point in time and plans to dramatically increase the number of courses in the next few months
• The course fees are waivered for now, which means you can take any course for free. However, this is going to change soon.
• It promises to teach a company-consulted curriculum and ensure job placement after completing a certain number of courses on a subject. BYLC has bee doing job fair and job placement for its graduates for a while now through its OPD program.
• This should allow BYLC to sustainably scale its program to a large number of people without putting extra-pressure on its infrastructure and venture into broader education space.

Premium users of BYLCx will have access to offline mentoring from BYLC instructors, proctored exams to help students evaluate progress and job placement support through BYLC’s Office of Professional Development. Based on research on market demands and skills required for the future of work, BYLCx plans to launch a series of subsequent courses on innovation and design thinking, entrepreneurship, data science, business analytics, financial management, and digital marketing.

Through a partnership with the Prime Minister’s a2i program, BYLCx has already provided comprehensive leadership training to over 4000 educators and young learners.

Bangladesh Youth Leadership Center (BYLC), the country's first leadership institute, exists to build connections among youth from diverse backgrounds, equip them with leadership skills, and enable them to have high impact in public, private, and civil sectors. All efforts aim to strengthen prosperity, justice, and inclusiveness in societies worldwide.

Related reading:

• BYLC Launches Leadership MOOC Platform BYLCx
• Life’s Work: An Interview with Ejaj Ahmad, Founder, and President, Bangladesh Youth Leadership Center (BYLC)