Dale Carnegie Training India is prospecting for tie-ups with the state employment exchanges to tap the huge number of unemployed youths who can be taught interpersonal or soft skills through its finishing schools.

According to Employment Exchange Statics Return of 2005 India has 947 employment exchanges with 3 crore 94 lakh and 78 thousand registered job-seekers. However, the number of registered job seekers has come down compared with that of the 2000, when the Employment Exchange Statics Return reported the number of registered job seekers at 4 crore 13 lakh 43 thousand and 6 hundered.

Dale Carnegie Training, designed by the author of the famous book How To Win Friends & Influence People, was brought to India in 2004 in partnership with Walchand Capital Ltd.

Sanjay Jha, executive director, said that in India, Dale Carnegie Training is partnering with at least 18 companies, including Tata Motors, Reliance Industries, Mahindra & Mahindra, State Bank of India, PricewaterhouseCoopers, HSBC, Wipro, Oracle and others, to improve the interpersonal skills of their staff.

But a huge opportunity lies in training the large number of unemployed youths, who can be tapped through the employment exchanges.

“We have proposed the West Bengal, Karnataka and Haryana governments to provide us with subsidised infrasructure and in turn we will provide training to the unemployed youths at a subsidised cost,” Jha said.

West Bengal has 66 lakh registered unemployed youth in the state, in India. “While the Karnataka and Haryana governments have agreed to provide us the subsidised infrastructure, the West Bengal government has shown positive gesture,” Jha said.

Dale Carnegie Training with a legacy of over 96 years, has trained 8 million people world wide in over 400 of the Fortune-500 companies. The training is represented in all the 50 states of the US and in over 80 countries worldwide.

According to Jha, while India has a pool of 14 million university graduates, which grows by a further 2.5 million every year, only one in ten graduates is considered employable by multinationals. For engineering graduates the ratio of employability is 1:4.

Many graduates possess cutting-edge technical skills but lag because of deficiencies in their interpersonal skills.

Citing a study by the National Association of Software & Services Companies (Nasscom), Jha said that India may have a shortage of half a million IT professionals by 2010, mostly because existing graduates lack the soft skills needed to fit into a cosmopolitan work environment.

Bhaskar Das, HR head of Cogzinant Technology Solutions, said that the Indian IT industry has for all the time been facing problems with talents lacking soft skill but most of the IT companies have made their own arrangements to train their staffs in soft skills.

As organisations and individuals increasingly recognise the opportunities for achievement through leveraging their human capabalities, a scope gets created for an emergence of a training industry.

Globally and in India, the training industry remains extremely huge but fragmented and Dale Carnegie Training wants to give a consolidated shape to this cluttered market.

Besides India, Dale Carnegie Training is looking at China, Malaysia, Indonesia and Japan as huge training industry markets, Jha said.