Story of EWskills
Where It All Started
We started VisionMachine- (IoT and Embedded Product design services) company back in 2015. We were developing projects like Industrial control systems (IoT), consumer electronics products, Automotive Engine monitoring solutions, Advanced Energy monitoring solutions, etc.
The Problem We Kept Facing
We were growing; however, one of the biggest challenges we faced was hiring an ECE/ Electronics Engineer.
Every time we needed a fresh ECE engineer, we hit the same wall. We kept our expectations low- we weren’t looking for experts. But it was still nearly impossible to find someone who understood the basics. My first interview question was simple: how do you connect an LED to a 9V battery? Just the connection and a resistor. That’s it.
Only 1–2% of candidates could answer it correctly. Master’s degree holders. CDAC graduates. Top-of-class marks. It didn’t matter. The answer wasn’t there.
We spent months searching for a single candidate with a basic understanding of electronics.
Over the years, I arrived at a number that still bothers me: in a good engineering college, 30–40% of CS graduates are genuinely job-ready. For ECE, that number drops below 5–10%.
The gap is real, and it’s getting wider.
The Reasons
Friction- Electronics is inherently harder to practice than software. Writing code needs only a laptop. Electronics need hardware boards, IDEs, and electronics components, oscilloscopes, equipment, and lab access; there is a lot of friction.
Academics fall short- especially in India, where teaching often fails to build actual engineering skill.
The resources- don't exist. Meanwhile, software engineers have LeetCode, HackerRank, and dozens of platforms that sharpen their thinking through thousands of graded problems. ECE engineers have... textbooks. The occasional Arduino tutorial. A YouTube video, courses that show them how to blink an LED, but not how to think like an engineer.
Meanwhile, through ElectronicWings- the hardware developer community we were building along with VisionMachine since 2015, grew into the largest of its kind in India. I was seeing this from the other side too.
Hundreds of thousands of engineers are trying to learn, trying to get better, using whatever resources are available to them. YouTube tutorials. projects. Paid courses that showed them how to follow along, not how to actually think.
Mugging up lists of “100 embedded interview questions” and hoping the theoretical answers will help them crack interviews.
True engineers are built by solving, debugging, and designing hundreds of problems.
Leetcode to GeeksforGeeks- all these platforms were helping to develop coding skills, depth, and engineering thinking for software developers; however, no one built the equivalent for electronics, because it's genuinely hard to build. Some browser-based simulation tools exist- Wokwi, Tinkercad, but simulation alone doesn't create engineering depth.
What was missing was structured, graded practice built around real engineering decisions.
So we decided to build it.
The Team
I didn’t do this alone. Since 2021, I have been focused on ElectronicWings- running contests, growing the community, and understanding what electronics engineers actually need. But the problem I’d been watching for years kept pulling at me. Every conversation with MNCs and startups came back to the same thing: we can’t find good candidates. The skill gap is everywhere.
I knew what needed to be built. I also knew how complex it would be. I started discussing it with Ajit and Suraj- the smartest people I know so far, also the brains behind ElectronicWings development.
Ajit and Suraj (Co-founders)- both with over a decade of embedded and software development and the sharpest Engineers I know- left secure top position jobs at large American and German MNCs in Bengaluru and moved to Pune.
Amrut, one of the sharpest hardware developers, joined us after leaving a position at a German MNC. These weren't small decisions. These were people betting on a problem they believed needed solving.
What made that possible is that we'd worked together before. Ajit, Suraj, Amrut, and I had all worked together at VisionMachine. We'd built ElectronicWings together. We knew how each other thought. We trusted each other. They believed in the EWskills idea because they'd lived the same frustration.
Alongside us, a team formed: Rohit, Sachin, Pratik, Rakhi, Sudam, Shreyas, and Mandar. Passionate, determined people who cared about getting this right.
With all the experience, it took us almost 2 years to launch the first website version, building from scratch — optimising every problem, every flow, every pixel.
What Exists Today
Every problem on EWskills is rooted in a real-world scenario - the kind of decision a working embedded engineer faces on the job. You write code, design a circuit, configure a peripheral, or select a component. Whatever you build gets tested and validated automatically. If something's wrong, you see exactly what failed and why - So you debug, fix, and learn.
Each track also includes quick reference guides so you can brush up on concepts before applying them directly to problems.
Currently (Jun 2026), EWskills has 636 problems across six skill tracks: Embedded C, C++ for Embedded Systems, Mastering Microcontrollers, Verilog, Component Skills, and Circuit Protection.
Free for Every Learner
EWskills is free- not as a free tier with a paywall waiting behind it, but as a deliberate choice. Electronics engineers building real things deserve access to real practice, regardless of where they are or what they can afford. The platform is sustained through sponsor partnerships with the electronics ecosystem, not by charging the people it's trying to help.
Why This Matters to Me.
EWskills didn't come out of a market opportunity. It came out of a decade of building embedded products, running a hiring process, and watching genuinely talented engineers fall short- not because they lacked ability, but because the right environment to build real skill had never existed for them.
I've seen what happens when an engineer gets the right practice. The confidence changes. The way they approach problems changes. The gap closes — not slowly, but quickly, once the friction is removed.
That's what we're building. A place where any electronics engineer, anywhere, can practice like a professional — from day one.
Electronics engineering deserves a world-class practice platform. EWskills is our honest effort to build it.
| Written by- | |
 | Ganesh Khomane (Co-Founder EWskills) |