Finishing schools to train Indian engineers

Bangalore: Finishing schools are set to make a big impact among India's job-hungry software engineers in terms of equipping them with workplace etiquette, as the country's booming information technology sector cries out for urbane talent.

One of the first such institutions in the country opened last week in the southern city of Mysore, offering a 12-month course designed to hone students’ technical and inter-personal skills and expose them to the corporate culture. The school will be run by the Raman International Institute of Information Technology, a division of Raman Computers.

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At least 100,000 of the 300,000 engineers to be hired by Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys and Wipro this year could benefit from going to a finishing school, feels Kiran Karnik, president of National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom), which conceived the idea.

Sevral other schools will open in the next few months. Cultural studies and social activities will be given emphasis over technical and corporate issues.

The aim is to "sharpen some of the social, presentation and communication skills in which many Indian engineers are found wanting when they interact with clients and colleagues from other cultures," Karnik said.

Dun and Bradstreet, the US-based provider of financial information, estimated that the industry would face a shortage of 500,000 skilled workers by 2009 in addition to competition from emerging rivals such as China and the Philippines.

Although India has no dearth of educated people, with 3.1 million university graduates, only 30 percent of the engineering graduates are actually employable by the IT industry, says M.N. Vidyashankar, the IT secretary of Karnataka.

To combat that, IT firms are stepping up their internal and on-the-job training efforts and tying up with institutions to supplement academic training with inputs from industry.

Global software and outsourcing giant Accenture has joined forces with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to train its employees.