IT Awareness

Why there is a need of a finishing school, anyway?

2008-05-20T12:46:00.000+05:30

Typically, I personally believe that we have a very basic issue of taking permission for everything and this is true for our curriculum as well. The same old orthodox method of organizational structure where the issues gets lost without anybody noticing them altogether. The technological world has been moving at a very fast pace and typically it takes no time for any technology to become obsolete. The corporate world has been able to keep up with the pace but unfortunately our education system has not. That is where the finishing schools have come up. It is something better for the students who while joining the course are given great promises of a secure job after completing the course but the reality is something really different and shocking.

This is what I believe is the problems with the colleges:
1) Industry certified and accredited curriculum
2) Experienced faculty to deliver these courses
3) A very close association with the industry
4) Close monitoring of Projects assigned
5) Lack of career counseling at the very beginning of their course
6) Soft Skills

Only effective, industry accepted education can solve India's employment crisis and finishing schools try to bridge that gap.

Seminar on Digital Signature, its Authentication and related Cyber Laws

2008-05-14T11:20:00.002+05:30

We have launched another expert seminar on 'Digital Signature, its Authentication and related Cyber Laws', first of this series is happening on 24th May 2008. The main objective of this seminar is the give an overview about these technologies to students and their usages. Digital signatures have been around for a while but still many people although having heard of it do not know its exact implementation and usage, this series aims to impart that knowledge.

The seminar is going to be conducted by an Expert who is also a renowned academician and has presented papers in various conferences. More information relating to the seminar will be available on the website very soon.

Slew of new courses coming!!

2008-05-12T12:33:00.002+05:30

It gives me immense pleasure to notify you all that there are a number of new courses that we will be launching very soon. To give you all an idea, there will be a course on networking, LAMP and Multimedia. All the courses as per our company policy has been designed after getting inputs from the industry and the experts who are going to deliver the courses are Industry Professionals. There has been a rapid growth in the demand for experts in respective fields who are equipped with the above mentioned technologies and it is our strong belief that they will be absorbed by the industry.

We continuously seek recommendations and suggestions for courses and seminars, so please suggest. If there is anything else that you would like us to implement please feel free to notify us.

Salary hike for Freshers!!

2008-01-08T18:43:00.000+05:30

I am very delighted while writing this post; delighted because I just read a report on Rediff where it said that Infotech freshers can expect a 40% pay hike this financial year. The report states that virtually every IT company is increasing their headcount by exorbitant numbers this year. Most of the hiring if not all is going to happen via Campus Interviews and the companies will all be hunting to grab a share of the best talent pool available.

As a result of which there will be a real shortage of employable manpower in the very near future. So if any fresher is employable as per industry standards then he is very likely going to be snapped very soon by big MNC's be it National or International.

Source: rediff.com

Suggest US?

2008-01-04T11:20:00.000+05:30

We believe that nobody is perfect and that implies to us as well. But, we can always strive to achieve greater perfection but continuously improving ourselves. So we have created 2 really short surveys, which we believe can help us get better insights on what our students/prospectives think.

I welcome you to please take this 2 simple and very short surveys and equip us with your valuable feedback. I personally promise you that all your suggestions will be considered and implemented as per accordance and depending on other conditions.

Suggest a Course to us!

Seminar Suggest!

Thanks once again for your valuable time, it is highly appreciated.

Seminar Details

2007-12-28T13:49:00.000+05:30

It gives me immense pleasure to launch Indian Youth's Employability. Check out the details and please make it convenient to attend. See you there.

Awareness Seminars

2007-12-26T11:10:00.000+05:30

A dream come true for me personally. For the first time we have launched a series of Awareness seminars for anybody who would like to know more about IT. We have realized an issue among students is that when they are studying they are still not sure what kind of a professional they would like to become.

Some of the issues that we found out are as follows (I am sure there are a lot others):

Incorrect guidance from the faculty (not all but most of them)
The faculty is itself not aware of the industry trends

The actual person who suffers is the individual. What happens is that when they go to the industry looking for jobs, their resume looks good but when they have to perform because of their lack of practical/technical skills they are not able to perform on job.

The main aim of these seminars will be to pass information to the students and also that they have a platform to ask any questions they have. The first seminar that we have kicked of is focussed on discussing the country's manpower employability, which I believe that the students are definitely unaware of. For more information send us an email or give us a call and we would like to have all you students attend them.

Unemployability

2007-11-21T11:37:00.000+05:30

There was a news article printed on 9th November in The Times of India (Ahmedabad). It was a summary of the India Labour Report 2007. As per the article our Indian Youth are unemployable, it highlighted some of the key issues with our manpower that needs to be immediately addressed to solve the ongoing problems. Summary from the article is as follows:

90% of employment opportunities require vocationals skills but 90% of our college and school output has only bookish knowledge
Only 8% of the youth are unemployed, but 53% of them have some kind of skill deprivation.
Youth unemployability is a bigger crisis than unemployability as poor quality of skills or education show up in low incomes rather than unemployment.
Failure in quality education and skills, lack of technical and vocational training and policy blunders make it imperative that our system needs a structural change.

It also says that even though India is the fastest growing economy in the world its per capita income continues to be the lowest in the world. As a result of which economists believe that India will grow to be amond the richest countries in the world, but its citizens will not be as wealthy as the average American and European citizen. Repairing the skills deficit could cost approximately 10% of our GDP over the next two years, but merely allocating more funds is not the solution.

This is really an alarming and disturbing situation and I personally believe that the governments and other agencies will do whatever they can, but it is also very important for the youth to take control of their careers. I suggest that each one should draw a clear career path after proper counselling, write their limitations, and work towards achieving their career and solving their limitations.

Understanding various branches of IT and URADICS

2007-10-19T16:09:00.000+05:30

Information Technology is a very broad subject. It is not of just programming which the current youth understands. I have always been a strong believer of specializations and the same thing applies to IT.

For example, broadly a computer can be classified in two parts hardware and software. Sub-classifications under the hardware could be hard disk drive, RAM, etc. and under the software category could be say Operating System, programming languages, etc. At URADICS, our main objective is to concentrate on very niche specializations and target a very specific market. The first course that we have launched is focused on creating professionals who are experts in Web Application Development based on .Net technology. One other powerful technology on which web applications can be created is Java. Both the technologies are widely used and accepted and both of them have their own advantages and limitations. URADICS has begun its operations choosing the .Net platform.

At URADICS, we have another policy of being continously available and that all the emails will be answered within 4 hours of receipt within business hours. Customer service is another issue which we believe is very important and that's why all the calls to URADICS will be answered by a live person all the time and there will be no IVR.

Uniqueness @ URADICS

2007-09-13T19:32:00.000+05:30

People often ask me questions like, how is URADICS different from other institutes around, why should we come to you, etc. There are many small little things that are unique with URADICS; some of them are as follows:

a) Experienced Faculty from the Industry
b) Course designed as per experience of the individual
c) Development like training environment
d) Developing individuals by creating awareness on technical/non-technical issues
e) Soft Skills enhancement
f) Hands-on project

This is just an exhaustive list; with all these small little things, we will be doing a complete characteristic re-modelling of the individual. It goes in-line with our objective to have the resource employable and that requires us to be very close to the industry and at the same time be close to the students. We understand the limitations faced by students and the requirements placed by industry and we try bridge the gap to help both of them.

At URADICS, we believe in Quality and not Quantity. Our target is to make sure that every single student, secures a promising and progressing career. The success of the students and the change that they will bring to the companies will speak for the success of URADICS.

URADICS Covered By Press

2007-09-07T18:28:00.000+05:30

URADICS in ET

2007-09-06T18:12:00.000+05:30

ET ran an article on 4th September titled, "Industry takes steps to make graduates employable" in which they talked about what the industry is doing to help the students.

The story said that the companies have recognized the existing gap between the current industry requirements and the curriculum in the current academia, and that there is a requirement to fill this gap. The article states that there is a requirement for approximately 60,000 IT/ITeS professionals in the next two years. There was a mention about URADICS in the article as well and that we will be providing training in all IT verticals so that the students become employable. We will be creating an awareness among students so that they realize their field of interest and then will groom them accordingly.

We want to announce that we will be providing training with the latest .Net Framework 3.0 to the students to make them in accordance with the industry.

Once again the whole team at URADICS thanks The Economic Times to cover us at their prestigious newspaper. We will display a scanned copy of the whole article on our blog as well.

Finishing Schools/Institutes

2007-08-29T20:22:00.000+05:30

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!!

2007-08-28T11:23:00.000+05:30

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!!

2007-08-26T17:25:00.000+05:30

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

2007-08-23T23:14:00.000+05:30

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

2007-08-22T23:30:00.000+05:30

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!!

2007-08-21T21:36:00.000+05:30

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

2007-08-20T20:10:00.000+05:30

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.