Finishing Schools/Institutes

Finishing schools have been in existence since a long time. Previously it used to be only for girls but now the whole concept has evolved. Such kind of training has been in existence in almost every organization irrelevant of the size.

Every organization has a different style of working and they work on different technologies. Even though the base technology remains the same the architectural layer technologies do differ a lot. So every organization goes through some sort of internal training for new employees and thats what I refer to as a finishing process or grooming of the candidate to make sure that they are as per the requirements. Now this concept has completely evolved into a full fledged institutes like ours where we train students to be employable by the industry. I refer to this as an overall personality change of the student.

The question arises of why there is a requirement of external finishing schools. The main reason for that is because there is a huge demand of skilled manpower and companies do not want to waste their time and money grooming the students.

Awareness!!

Yesterday, I attended the FOCUS seminar organized by GCCI where the chief guest was Dr. Bakul Dholakia. He was there to give his insights into what is required for a programme like FOCUS to be sucessful. I wont go into more detail about what GCCI is doing, but will talk about the valuable comments that he made.

What he said was that if you want to reduce the employability gap you have to make sure that the place where he is getting trained are passionate about education and also that the students should be completely aware of what they are doing. I completely agree with him because if you are not passionate about what you do you are never going to succeed. UG's should understand that life is not just near the surroundings of their colleges and they should be serious about their career. Well anyways I will not talk about philosophical details here as they are not relevant to this topic. I want to summarize this by saying that if you want committed students raise the level of awareness among them. Educating them on what they are doing or they should do will help them and the industry a lot. And at the same time the same level of committment is required from the institute that they are going to get trained from. According to me it does not matter if the institute is a private or a public one but it should have the passion factor for its programmes to be successful

Employability Gap!!

This is one major question that is haunting the employers of today. They have huge demands and the supply is not according to their standards. This results in a huge gap between the students and the employers.

There are many studies available on the Internet that suggest Industry-Academic partnership is the way to go ahead. But for any partnership to become profitable needs co-ordination from both the parties involved. Unlike our private universities the government funded universities have so much of political involvement that they cannot flourish the way they want.

Just for all the folks out there GCCI is already aware about this issue and there is also a special seminar on reducing the employability gap on Monday 27th August 2007 at their respective premises. They have also launched a special program called FOCUS, details of which are not exactly available right now. I am going to attend the seminar tomorrow and will keep you updated on the issue.

Re-Training

It exists in all forms of the IT industry. The industry is moving at such a fast pace that the companies want their products on cutting-edge latest technologies. To meet such demands the providers have to upgrade their systems, which in turn leads to the employees upgrading their skills. This is an ongoing process, although there are many situations other than this where re-training is not only important but also a necessity.

As far as the career is concerned it is very important for every individual to keep oneself updated with the current skills. At URADICS it will be one of our main focus areas where we will be running a refresher for the graduates and the existing Industry professionals so that they can brush up their skills.

Changing IT Education

I have a personal feeling that the IT education industry, including both private and public needs a complete makeover. Edu providers needs to understand the fact that the industry is moving very fast; applications are being developed on latest technologies and if not all but most of the projects have became mission-critical and time-bound.

Infact by the time the courses get over they are already outdated. I do not say that they need to change their curriculum every time there is a new technological breakthrough but yeah definitely the educationists should weigh the new technologies with its future demand and then they can decide whether to include it in their module or not. I personally do not believe in long courses, because I believe that they drag. I believe that the courses should be short, rigourous and be very specific. The added advantage of this is that the resources are ready in a very short span of time and as they start working they also get experience.

Tomorrow, I am going to talk about Retrainning which I believe is important for every single individual; irrespective of the industry they belong to.

Freshers Wanted!!

Todays Economic Times had an interesting article on the salary structure and the shortage of middle level officers and its effects on the IT offshoring industry.

I do not want to comment on the particular article, but I find it interesting so I have got it scanned for you. The industry is on a hiring spree and according to me what they do is that they hire freshers get them trained specifically on their projects. The advantage that they have is, with just a backlog of a couple of months they do get the manpower as per their specific requirements. I do not believe that the companies want to hire in such a way but unfortunately they are not left with any option.

We have also came across an interesting finding; that many of the students do not have an idea of the different fields that the IT industry has. All they know that they want to do something related to IT but do not have a basic understanding that Hardware, Software, etc. are different fields and then there are sub-classifications. I am planning to create a very basic information chart where I will try to create awareness among the students within different fields. Not all the students have the same interests, some might be good at software, some might be good at Networking, etc. etc. but for them to know what they are good at; they first have to understand what these different fields are and what their respective careers are associated with them.

URADICS

URADICS is an IT finishing institute where our main target is to reduce the employability gap. We do not believe in providing our own certifications and do provide training as per the current industry requirements.

The training that we impart not only includes grooming of their technical skills but we also induce soft skills in them; which are unfortunately missing in most of the current lot. In the current environment soft skills are as important as technical skills, as in most of the companies there are clients from the global marketplace who do visit their vendors. Many industry reports suggest that out of all the engineering graduates every year only 25% of them are employable. This is a very shocking number because there is a huge demand in the industry but a short supply of the skilled manpower. India has an advantage of being one of the very few countries in the world where the majority of the manpower is under 50.

Our vision for URADICS is to make sure that the valuable resource gets a career of his choice and the industry gets a steady supply of manpower suiting to their needs.