Kolkata, July 23 (IANS): Indian start-ups are ensuring their workforces stay competitive through online re-skilling courses, industry experts say.

Start-ups are re-skilling employees through Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) such as those in Android Development, Big Data and Hadoop Development, Ethical Hacking, SAP Security, Robotics, web and app design.

"The trend is that the start-up founders are mostly industry professionals; they have been working in multinational companies and very well understand the need and requirement of few skill sets," Raju Vanapala, founder and CEO, LearnSocial, an e-learning company, told IANS.

"These people always ensure that their team should be well equipped with required skill sets to meet the cut-throat competition and hence willing to sign up for the re- skilling courses," he said.

In addition to providing the edge, re-skilling through e-learning is also linked to better market performance of companies.

"It has also been found that companies and organisations that did have a strong learning culture did better in their market than those who did not; therefore, the cost of re-skilling through e-learning is considerably small in consideration to the benefits bestowed by it," said Diwakar Chittora, founder and CEO, Intellipaat, an online platform for 'high quality, low cost' courses.

Chittora said with the recent IT boom and keeping in consideration that India is the largest universal language-proficient country in the world, India provides the "optimum breeding ground for e-learning opportunities and the capitalising possibilities of the same are limitless".