On Sunday Home services marketplace Urban Company states, Company aims to on-board over 20,000 professionals on its platform on this year to meet the strong growth in demand for various services post the lock down.

Urban Company co-founder Varun Khaitan states, “Currently, the company has more than 40,000 gig workers on its platform, of which over 35,000 are present in India. Of the total base of gig workers on the platform in India, more than one-third is women working as beauticians and massage therapists.”

He added, "We have accelerated our pace of on boarding more service professionals in line with our 2021 business growth plan...We plan to on-board more than 50 per cent gig workers on our platform in line with our 2021 strategy."

Varun pointed out that the company has on boarded 10,000 AC technicians to prepare for the 2021 summer season as it expects the demand for AC servicing to more than double this year.

He added, "We plan to service about 3 million ACs covering 1.5 million households across the country in the next 2-3 months."

Over the last few months, the company has also started operations in cities counting Bhopal, Coimbatore, Kochi, Kanpur, Varanasi, Agra and Guwahati, and that Urban Company will launch operations in a few more cities over March and April.Varun states, "By virtue of the model, they are able to earn more than their counterparts in the traditional industry setup. Further, it's scalable; reflective in our mission to create one million micro entrepreneurs in the next five years. We have built an in-house team of over 200 full-time trainers, who train between 3,000 to 5,000 professionals a month. These training (and retraining) programs focus on both core skills and soft skills, and can last anywhere from one week to two months."

He explained that, “Prior to March 2020, the company trained professionals in its training centres spread across the country but with the pandemic and ensuing lock-down, training efforts were moved online. Our Tech team developed the entire back-end infrastructure required to deliver these training modules virtually -- from WHO protocols on hygiene and safety to skill-specific modules and tests...Now, as things start to open up more, we will also resume conducting physical training sessions in our approximately 100 training classrooms present pan-India."

Urban Company has an agreement with the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE) and the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) that issue skill certificates to its fleet of service professionals upon clearing the required assessments.