The top five IT companies in India hire about 25,000 professionals in one quarter. The top five spent close to $500 million in education and training annually. With India accounting for 65% of the global offshore IT industry and 46% of the worldwide BPO industry?exporting $17 billion worth of services in 2005-06, the need and potential for higher professional education and training in the IT services sector cannot be understated. According to a CII-Icrier study, ?Towards excellence?higher education in India,? this particular sector has the potential to cross $60 billion by 2010, employing 2.3 million directly and that ?research and innovation? will be the key drivers of

future growth.

Several IT companies, therefore, have been at the forefront of training so as to take care of the skills? shortages. Wipro Technologies, for instance, has 120-people training teams. The company spends nearly 2% of its revenues annually on training and has tied up with several institutes such as IIT-Madras, IISc and BITS-Pilani, for offering higher studies in technology for its employees and similarly with IIM-B, IIM-Calcutta, Symbiosis, and Stanford University and Harvard Business School for management education.

D Selvan, vice president, talent transformation, Wipro Technologies, said: ?Many of these are premium brands, and we believe that it is better to leverage the value that these would bring to the table. About 1,000 employees at Wipro undergo higher studies in management education currently, while close to 5,000 people pursue higher studies in technology.?

For instance, Wipro academy of software excellence (WASE) programme for science graduates has been a 10-year-old initiative that has so far seen over 600 candidates graduating. The company?s training facility has the capacity to train 5,000 candidates at any given time.

Training is broadly focussed on domain skills, behavioural training, execution excellence, and business skills and cross-cultural aspects among others. According to the CII report, in India?s GDP, the share of the services sector has gone up from 50% in 2000-01 to over 56% in 2005-06 and that ?training and education? have become an invaluable aspect? in the service sector. According to the director, human resources, education, research and administration, TV Mohandas Pai, Infosys Technologies, ?The training methods at Infosys focus mainly on two areas?technology and personal development. In technology, there is a huge gap between what is taught in our universities and what we require. We train them on topics such as software architecture, algorithmic thinking and programming language. Most of our graduates do not have the domain skills required to work in a software industry. And what is taught in colleges, is taught in a local language, not in English. Infosys has an annual budget of $175 million for training, which is larger than the budget of any university in India. We have spent Rs 1,650 crore in education infrastructure.? Vocationalisation of education is therefore the need of the hour. US based ThoughtWorks, which has a training facility in Bangalore, plans to market its training programme for the IT industry, to meet a market demand for ?niche technologies?. Chaitanya Nadkarny, director, Operations and HR, ThoughtWorks Technologies, says, ?We are actively considering going to market with some of our training programmes, within the next three quarters. Very nascent technologies, unlike the mainstream technologies of Java and .Net, have a lot of training needs coming up. Such technologies have hardly any learning materials or case studies available in the market.?

Meanwhile, Tata Consultancy Services has completed the pilot program of Ignite – the company?s initiative to help science graduates transform into software professionals and equip them with the requisite IT skills. The pilot had 500 trainees who were inducted into the company?s operations thereafter. TCS has built a state-of-the art facility for the Ignite program at its Thoraipakkam centre in Chennai. The company plans to scale up the Ignite programme to hire 2,000 science graduates in the current financial year.

S Ramadorai, CEO & Managing Director said: ?TCS Ignite has proved that with the right learning methodologies science graduates can be empowered with knowledge and skills relevant to this sector, thereby developing new sources of talent to sustain the growth of the Indian IT industry.? IT giant Wipro Technologies also has a countrywide ?campus-to-career? applied innovation initiative to accelerate the involvement of engineering students in getting ?hands-on? programming experience and domain expertise by doing projects of industry relevance.

?Magnum Opus is a Wipro mega initiative involving architects from Wipro and university students. This initiative was envisioned with three main objectives: To achieve provide practical training to the high quality recruits who join us from various universities, to actively contribute to open-source and to setup up a platform to actively develop solutions that would affect India,? said Rajesh Mishra, Chief Technology Officer, Telecom and Product Engineering, Wipro.

Typically, fresh recruits go through a three-month training programme and do not work on any project, thereby not adding to the revenue kitty of the organisation. ?About Rs 50,000 is spent on the training of one employee. So we are tying up with educational and training institutions to train employees on campus. This way an employee will be billable from the day one and the training cost will also be reduced to a third,? a company executive said. The move benefits employees as increments and promotions are based on the employees getting billed versus the employees on bench.

NIIT?s Enterprise Learning Solutions, offers integrated learning solutions to Fortune 500 companies, universities, technology companies, training corporations and publishing houses. NIIT has partnerships with technology giants such as Intel, IBM, Microsoft, Google, Cisco, Citrix and Hitachi Data Systems to train their people, partners, customers and end users. The company caters to over 3,00,000 learners globally. About 10,000 new vocational schools are required to fulfill skills? deficit in India, according to the HRD ministry.

Aptech has a pre-hire programme called Pravesh where it trains candidates who are in their final year in colleges and have been given employment letters by IT companies. ?Aptech trained 11,06,506 students globally in 2006. Out of this around 20-25% students took up career-based programmes, of which around 40% got employed by IT, ITES organisations. Besides this, a lot of them got picked by prominent organisations that might not be directly into IT, ITES,? said Pramod Khera, CEO & MD, Aptech Ltd. In India, the current non-formal education industry for IT is estimated to be Rs 2,500 crore and growing at 25% annually. Meanwhile, according to a study conducted by Evalueserve, there will be a potential demand for over 1,60,000 foreign language professionals in the Indian offshoring (IT, BPO and KPO) industry by 2010. According to Rohini Arora, MD of Integrated Language Solutions: ?We envision to fill up the gap between demand and supply of foreign language professionals by offering courses which are economical and accessible to everyone,? whereas, Sreekala R, general manager, talent transformation, Wipro, said: ?For language training, where the company has tied up with various institutes, sessions are more intensive. For example, an employee may be put solely on language training for as long as five months, when he is to be taught Japanese.?

?With inputs from C Jayanthi