Educating For A Cause

Hiring and retaining good employees is the chief concern of nearly every
company today. Limited growth opportunities, role stagnation, dissatisfaction in
salaries, etc are some of the reasons why retention rate is at an all time low.

Changing conditions

While worldwide some companies are firing people to cover their losses,
others are opting for better options, like opening training institutes to impart
the requisite skill set for the jobs.

AMD recently announced that it is putting off 1,600 jobs globally. As per the
company, the move to cut about 10 percent of its 16,800 employees is part of a
cost-cutting plan. Dell also announced to layoff 8,800 employees worldwide in an
effort to make the company more competitive and profitable. Google has evicted
300 people in DoubleClick; Motorola has cut 2,600 jobs globally to cut costs and
the company's total lay off since 2007 is about 10,000; Birlasoft's score is 100
and TCS sacked 1,200 employees. While the recent economic slowdown can be
partially held responsible for the mass sacking, one of the reason for companies
to ask employees to leave was the lack of appropriate skills.

In such a scenario, comp­anies that understand what their employees want and
need in the workplace, and make a strategic decision to proactively fulfill
those requirements would become the dominant players in their respective
markets.

Efforts by vendors and partners

Various vendors and partners have opted for different initiatives to counter
the ever-growing attrition issue. Devendra Taneja, Director, PC Solutions, Delhi
established Institute of Network Technology (INT) in 1994 as a solution to beat
the crunch of trained manpower. INT was created with the objective of enabling
youth to gain knowledge about IT sector and get new career avenues. “This was
the time when PC Solutions was an integration partner of Novell for networking
projects. Specific brand technology knowledge was needed for professionals to
effectively execute networking projects. Back then, networking was a relatively
new concept. It was very difficult to get trained/familiar resources. There was
a huge gap between demand and supply of trained and certified recourses.
Fortunately Novell had a structured model to deliver such trainings and
considering PC Solutions was a leading partner, we were granted this status. We
looked at it as an option to create trained resource pool option, rather than
train in house persons only,” said Taneja.

Gartner's Indian CIO Study indicated that the employee hiring ratio has gone
up from 2:1 to about 15:1 in the recent past, which is also a direct indication
of the availability of skilled manpower in the country.

At HCL Career Development Center, the training programs and modules are
designed by industry experts and are highly customized as per the needs of the
industry. Programs from HCL provide in-depth understanding of technology and
give hands-on experience on cutting edge technologies,” shared Rajendra Kumar,
Executive VP, HCL Infosystems.

The center offers specialized programs in IT hardware, networking and
software with an aim to transform amateurs into industry ready profe­ssionals.
Elaborating on the center, Kumar said, “Our programs have been designed to cater
to the needs of different individuals like fresh graduates and professional who
are looking to upgrade their skills. We also have tie-ups with industry veterans
like Microsoft, Red Hat, Oracle and Prometric.”

Cisco Networking Academy is another innovative education initiative that
delivers informa­tion and communication technology skills to improve career and
economic opport­unities around the world.

The future

The increasing demand for trained workforce has opened up a new avenue for
the IT industry to concentrate on. With HCL and Cisco already getting their act
together, it won't be surprising to see industry stalwarts like Microsoft,
Oracle and others following suit. Even though many software companies provide
training to fresh graduates once they are inculcated into the system, such
training institutes will help graduates and professionals increase their skill
sets in specific domains, which they want to choose as a career.

Whether or not the concept of training youth for a cause works out is yet to
be seen, but as of now it opens up newer opportunities for youth to grab and for
the IT industry to leverage.

DQC New Bureau