Rearing IT talent

Mark Twain once said, "I never let my schooling interfere with my education."? Today, unfortunately, it seems that we are doing just that. There is no correlation between certification and education any more. Certified engineers are to be had a dime a dozen - this takes me back to the era when it was not uncommon to come across an office peon with an MA degree, when they were all the rage. The mismatch between the requirements of the industry and the products of our educational institutes is tremendous. As a result, although we are churning out engineering graduates at the rate of 350,000 every year, making the country the second largest producer of engineering talent in the world, we are not optimizing our talent pool.

Over 1346 institutions offering BE and B-Tech degrees in different areas of specialization, the number of engineering colleges in India has grown at 20 percent annually, as has the output of engineering talent and an overwhelming 60 percent of these engineering graduates take up IT/software related streams as specializations. However there is a very low correlation between academic scores basic IT abilities, a sign of a mismatch between industry expectations and academic performance. In fact, when Kiran Karnik of NASSCOM spoke on the disconnect between education and the IT industry, he said that only 10 per cent of the graduating engineers every year were employable. And the gap is only widening. A NASSCOM study maintains that the gap between industry requirements and availability of talent is, in fact, widening for two reasons: the industry continues to grow while only a miniscule percentage of graduates from technical institutions are employable.

The shortfall is estimated in terms of millions. With a requirement of a 2.3 million strong IT and BPO workforce by 2010 to maintain its current market share, India is facing a shortfall of nearly 0.5 million qualified employees, of which nearly 70 percent will be concentrated in the BPO sector.

Clearly the problem needs to be addressed from the bottom upwards and this can only happen when the IT -ITES industries, the Government and academia work in close cooperation. The current crop of IT talent needs to be assimilated into the workforce through short-term training programmes, though this is at best, temporarily plugging a gap. The introduction of industry-endorsed certifications and accreditations will ensure go a long way in establishing a quality baseline. Deregulation of higher education and reducing the tendency to over-centralise policies relating to higher education are only two of the steps that need to be taken in this direction. A more essential and sustainable solution is for the government, IT industry and educational institutions to collaborate in order to ensure that the education being imparted to our future engineers is relevant to the industry and up to date.

At the end of the day, quoting Mark Twain again, (Pudd'nhead Wilson), "Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education."