India Inc demand drives IT training market

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Mumbai, August 27:: The information technology training sector in India is witnessing a boom, driven by a talent crunch, paucity of employable' graduates and all-round need for trained manpower at all levels, industry officials said.

This growth is largely led by corporate training, especially at induction levels, followed by re-skilling training.

"We are seeing a huge spurt in corporate training, specifically oriented towards inducting first-timers," R Krishnan, executive director at Aptech, said.

The major demand was coming from corporations and organisations that wanted them to come in and train large batches of students on various skills, he added.

In a survey published last month, IT magazine Dataquest pegged the IT training market in India in 2006/07 at Rs 21.35 billion, a rise of 46 per cent from the previous year.

Of this, 64 per cent was accounted for by corporate training and the remaining from individual training.

Prosanto Roy, Chief Editor, Dataquest, attributed the sudden growth (the growth in FY06 was 14-15 per cent) to the recent expansion of software firms in China and a few other countries.

He said after the scorching growth last year it would grow at a more sedate 35-40 per cent in the current fiscal year.

Corporate Training

Apex body National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom), estimating India's requirement of software professionals at 2.3 million by 2010, has predicted a shortage of 0.5 million skilled knowledge workers based on current supply.

NIIT Ltd and Aptech are two of the largest and oldest players in the sector and have been busy expanding not only in India but also overseas.

"We are continuing to expand our brand equity - more than 12 per cent in terms of capacity across the world," G Raghavan, President, Global Individual Learning Business at NIIT, said.

The company, which derives a major porton of its revenues from corporate training, is focussing specifically on engineering students.

It recently signed agreements for expanding its training programmes in Malaysia and Vietnam.

Huge wage hikes, at an average of 15 per cent, especially at the middle level, have led IT companies to resort to freshers.

"In any Indian software company, anyone worth their salt does not hire less than 10,000 people in any year," Krishnan said.

Aptech, which has been more of a retail player compared to NIIT, has gone one step further. It is training graduates in its retail programme soft skills to make them work-ready.

"It is now known that less than 25 per cent of our graduates are employable," said Krishnan. "That is because they do not have communications skills."

Training Skills

The demand for IT training is greater than the supply, but both NIIT and Aptech say they are able to take on the load. However, "the number of players in IT training is not enough, there is space for more players," said Roy.

The course-ware is the most important thing, trainers are only important as the delivery mechanisms, industry players said.

"So the people who have to be really brilliant in this are the course designers," said Roy.

Raghavan said more technology would come in the arena of course delivery and content.