Gaurav Sharan
By day, Gaurav Sharan works in banking. By habit, he studies for the future. He’s a Regional Marketing Manager at Indian Overseas Bank and, as Convener of the bank’s Product Adoption Committee, he has become a product strategist in all but title: reading what stakeholders need, learning why some products take hold and others don’t.
Gaurav comes from Muzaffarpur, Bihar. He is not content to rely on degrees already earned or experience already gained. For him, staying relevant means staying in motion, constantly seeking new knowledge and skills. That instinct is what led him to NPTEL, where he began building a new layer of expertise in management, analytics, banking, and fintech.
What first drew him in was not hype, but practicality. He wanted courses that were credible, affordable, and genuinely useful for career advancement. NPTEL, with its IIT-backed teaching and low examination cost, stood out as a platform that combined trust with value. For a working professional trying to upskill without stepping away from work, that accessibility was crucial.
The real story, though, is not just about enrolling in courses. It is about how he made learning fit into a crowded life. He does not describe some perfectly structured study routine. Instead, he talks about using the margins of the day: commutes, travel time, quiet moments after work. He watches lectures in the cab, listens while on the move, and turns spare time into study time.
In his telling, NPTEL works because it respects the reality of professional life; it allows learning to happen without demanding that life stop first. This flexibility has been key to his consistent progress.
His course choices reveal the direction of his ambition. Alongside Management and Marketing subjects, he has taken up areas such as Business Intelligence ,Data Analytics and Coding with Python, Commercial Banking and Fintech. Among these, Data Analytics and Coding with Python have shaped him the most. He sees Fintech and AI not as mere buzzwords, but as powerful forces already reshaping banking, from automated loan approvals to sophisticated risk management. According to him, professionals in the sector need to understand these technological shifts before they are overwhelmed by them, ensuring they remain valuable assets in an evolving landscape.
The rewards have not been merely intellectual. Gaurav says the certifications have strengthened his resume, increased his visibility on LinkedIn, and brought recognition from colleagues who now see him as someone prepared for larger responsibilities and new projects, a perception he has backed with a a Project Management Professional (PMP) certification and a Certified ScrumMaster (CSM). He is now pursuing a Master of Computer Applications (MCA) at IIT Patna, and has started returning to NPTEL with a second purpose in mind: seeking out courses that complement the MCA syllabus and, in some cases, count toward its academic credits, so the two tracks reinforce each other rather than run side by side.
That is what makes his story resonate. NPTEL did not simply give Gaurav Sharan more certificates. It gave him a habit of asking, not just how a banking product works, but why people actually use it, and what the data can tell him about the difference. It’s that instinct, more than any single credential, that his colleagues have started to notice.
In an economy where professionals are often told to keep up, he offers a more disciplined lesson: do not wait to be left behind before you begin learning.
~written by Elsa Prasad