Making India Employable Date:   Tuesday , March 29, 2016 Born in 1991, Aricent is a pure-play product engineering services company that has tremendous expertise across all layers namely chip, hardware, software, end user experience and design. Myriad of disruptive technologies are propagating from all around the world. Particularly, the theme of IoT is horizontally overarching a number of industries including telecom, semiconductor, automobile and consumer electronics. To be successful in IoT, it is imperative to have excellent capability & ecosystem partnership encompassing all layers namely chip, hardware, software, end user experience and design. However, being a major services market, India lacks R&D expertise. Boasting a huge engineering population, India sits on the cusp of a great change. Attracting abundant investors, the country is rearing up to leverage the level of disruption proliferating in the engineering space globally. Unfortunately, only 24 percent of our engineering population gets employed, since the rest of them coming from tier-2 & 3 collages are not employable. This can be blamed on the humungous gap between what the collages teach and what companies require. Aricent Employability Program>/b> Being a big employer in India, we at Aricent recognize the needs of other companies as well and hence attempt to fill this gap with our CSR initiative - Aricent Employability Program. When we were brainstorming to do something for our country and engineering (which is very close to our heart), the idea of making our students employable, stood out. We joined hands with NASSCOM foundation, since it is one of the most prestigious bodies today working across IT industry. Aside from their solid understanding of the services industry, technology landscape and Indian milieu, NASSCOM has been doing a laudable share of programs in the technology realm. NASSCOM helped us build this program by bringing training partners onboard. Initially, we planned to train 2500 students so they will get SSC certification from NASSCOM and ultimately ensure that 1200-1500 of these students get placed in appropriate jobs. Completely dedicated to push gender diversity at a minimum of 60:40, Aricent is helping women to rise in all areas, starting with education. Hence, we are in the process of running this program in Rajasthan, which houses plenty of women collages, though we don\'t have our development centers there. This is atypical for us, because this program is running in Gurgaon, Bangalore and Chennai, where our centers are located. This way, we encourage our employees to visit these collages to share their knowledge. Meanwhile, the students will attain first hand experience by working on some of our projects in our premises. Surpassing our expectations, we currently have 38 collages registered, 3600 student enrolled and the gender ratio is almost 50:50. Instigated this program last year, now our first batch encompassing 21 collages has completed the training and is ripe for placements. And the second and third batches are about to start. Bringing Indian Community Up on the Technology Curve In partnership with IIT Madras, Aricent has also tied up with an institute called NPTEL to enable engineering students to take various online courses; thereby developing their skills to get jobs faster. We are receiving an absolutely fabulous response with more than 13000 students requesting for sponsorship for this training program last year. We will establish partnership with more universities like IIT and try to bring technology & engineering knowledge across the community. Aricent Employability Program being our first stride with NASSCOM, we are also scrutinizing some other initiatives like skill building exercise for not just engineering population, but in general to bring the whole community up on the technology curve. Rather than wandering all over the place and diluting the effect of these investments, we are keen on laying utmost focus in strengthening our partnership with professional companies to create a significant impact on our community. Hence, we are consolidating our efforts in just a couple of key projects. We want India to leverage the technology disruption by ensuring that our student community is thinking right and ready to take up the jobs in the market. This training program aims to inculcate the sense of entrepreneurship, independent & scientific thinking and thus R&D capabilities in the minds of our engineering population. One of our students bringing forth a spectacular product idea and us funding to develop it into the Google or Facebook of next generation, would be the perfect outcome of this program. (As told to Susila Govindaraj & Ananth V)