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At last the IT Industry Woke Up

Imran Shahnawaz
Saturday, April 1, 2006
Imran Shahnawaz
Mittun Madhavan rues the fact that at a time when the IT industry is hiring programmers at a frantic pace, he had to wait for six months to get a job.

Madhavan, a Computer Science graduate from the Government Engineering College in Trivandrum, Kerala, doesn’t blame his fate, but curses the education system that has not fostered what it had to long ago. A partnership with the industry that will help many like him to stay in tune with the latest technology.

He feels the requirement of the industry has changed over the past few years. “Today if you just depend on the college syllabus, you will reach nowhere. In this context, the alliance between The industry and academia will definitely give an early exposure about the field to an engineer,” he adds. However that was not the case few years back when the bubble of IT in India was on its expansion mode.

Bullish on the low cost market and the large number of knowledge workers many multinational companies have established their base in India. At that time it was a smooth ride for these multinationals. However the companies slipped into warm water when they moved onto the higher value chain in the Indian IT market.

Though numerically technical education is healthy in India, quality-wise it is very poor across-the-board. Indian engineers lack in quality and the level of training. Though India produces about 250,000 engineering graduates every year, multinationals have found only 25 percent employable, a Nasscom and McKinsey report said. As India has come up on the roadmap of multinationals they realized the need of solution architects, specialists with domain skills, designers and analysts, instead of programmers. However the difference in the goal of the industry and academia has created a skills gap.


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