The future of IT--2

While the nation's economy is soaring high on the growth front, the Indian IT industry bows in thanks and is getting all geared up for an even brighter future. The first step towards this has already been taken.

Though Open Source technologies entered the nation to a lukewarm welcome it has been doing really well for the past few years. With over 80 per cent companies moving from Proprietary Technologies to Open Source, the future seems almost predictable. Open Source Technologies provide flexibility, customisation, ease of development and security to the companies. Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle Corporation are amongst the few to have taken the lead.

With the growing demand for qualified and trained professionals touching an all time high, it is sad to see how little progress the IT Education sector has been making.

Addressing the talent shortage, equipping students with open source while also developing their soft skills — all seem to be problems the IT education sector has to devise solutions for.

NACE Solutions (P) Ltd, however seem to have found a solution. Having its centres in Chennai and Hyderabad, NACE has recently forayed into Bangalore. They not only offer Proprietary Technologies such as C, C++, JAVA, J2EE, J2ME, .NET and Data Warehousing but also offer Open Source Technologies to their students. They point out that their flagship course, LAMP a combination of Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP, is the alternative technology in lieu of Microsoft .NET and Sun Java.

NASSCOM has estimated that India's requirement for software professionals will be 2.3 million by 2010. Based on the current supply, they predict that the country will face a shortage of 0.5 million skilled workers.

To cope with this problem, NACE has devised a syllabus that lays more importance on practical training while not forgetting the basic theory.

Although, NIIT and Aptech have carved a niche in the field of IT education, the needs of the industry are changing. NACE, having accepted the change, has grown along with it, says a spokesperson.

Age of Finishing Schools
Initially the need for finishing schools was felt when students who gained technical training from training centres were found to be lacking in soft skills. Also since companies today crave for professionals who have received training according to their unique requirements. Hence the only option the companies were left with was to either train probable employees in their office premises or cut the cost and establish a franchise with ‘Finishing Schools’
According to NACE, to cut down this deployable time companies tie-up with finishing schools. While the Government of Karnataka has opened many finishing schools, from which over 40,000 professionals gain training every year, there are also many private owned finishing schools.

NACE, offers individual training as well as corporate training, hence accomplishing the purpose of a finishing school as well. Of the nine centres planned in Bangalore, the upcoming one in Jayanagar is a finishing school that they plan to start soon.

Also recently, many Online Finishing Schools (OFS) are coming up to empower students with the necessary skills while completing their studies itself. Mindlogicx recently launched one such OFS aiming at increasing the employability quotient of the final year students.

The skill gap is hence being filled and probable employees amongst the general student population are being trained effectively.