Giving details of the industry needs, Kiran Karnik, president, NASSCOM, ”According to NASSCOM McKinsey report 2005, the Indian industry is targeting $60 billion in exports by FY 2009-10. This translates to an estimated demand for 850,000 IT professionals and 1.4 million ITES-BPO professionals by 2010. If current trend in graduate out-turn and employment are maintained, India will be well positioned to meet demand of IT professionals. However, sustaining India’s disproportionately high share in the ITES-BPO segment will require the industry to attract an additional 500,000 employees- over the figures estimated if current out-flow is maintained. To sharpen India’s value proposition and extend India’s leadership in the global IT-ITES space, we are already taken several initiatives to further enhance the availability of and access to suitable talent for IT-ITES in India.”
Industry experts claim that creating an employable talent pool is an issue that needs to be addressed jointly by the government and the industry. According to Pramod Bhasin, CEO, Genpact, “it is high time the industry looked at training the next 100,000 people since we see a demand for more than this number in the coming year from the industry. There’s a need for an impetus in the education and training to build real expertise and skillsets.”
In fact NASSCOM, which is driving for the growth of ITeS- BPO industry has taken some positive steps towards this. It signed an MoU with University Grants Commission (UGC) and All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), to strengthen professional education through curricula, faculty, infrastructure, pedagogy improvements in line with the IT industry’s requirements of demand for skilled professionals.
Says Vasu Ramaswami, CEO, CFC India, “We need to work with universities so that they can teach the soft skills and added curricula to prepare present students for a future in ITeS-BPO industry.” As a matter of fact, Anand Talwar, VP, talent management, ITC Infotech claims that the company is already taking steps to improve the soft skills of students in educational institutions in Kolkata, who can be absorbed into the company. NASSCOM in its IT Workforce Development (ITWD) initiative is also working with the academia across the country to encourage and facilitate greater industry interaction, thus helping them share relevant feedback, stay updated on developments in the industry and giving them an opportunity to incorporate positive changes to their curriculum.
Under the aegis of NASSCOM’s Executive Development Programme (NEDP), NASSCOM and QAI, the leading quality consultancy in India, had unveiled the first-of-its-kind Certification Program for Frontline Management for ITES-BPO sector. The program was launched nationally and was organised in the five major metros namely Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, and Hyderabad, in FY 2005. The program will soon be extended to other cities likes Pune, Kolkata, Chandigarh, and Jaipur.
The association is now working with industry, present and prospective BPO employees and HR consultants to determine the best method to improve retention rates in the industry. Says Romi Malhotra, MD, Dell International Services India, “To improve the retention rate within the industry, we need to highlight the career path to the employees within a BPO organization. Once the employees understand their growth option within the organization, it is very unlikely they will want to leave. We need to look at enhancing their skill sets and using them to create job excitement for them.” NASSCOM in collaboration with the National Securities Depository Limited (NSDL) has launched National Skills Registry (NSR), in an attempt to further strengthen security in the Indian IT industry. NSR, a global first, is a centralized database of information about the employee's professional and educational background. The NSR has been specifically designed to ensure authenticity of data through independent verification and biometric identification of the individual. To further build the talent pool, the association also launched NASSCOM Assessment of Competence (NAC) program for the potential employees in the BPO industry. NAC is an industry standard assessment and certification program that aims to ensure the transformation of a "trainable" workforce into an "employable workforce". In the first phase, the pilot that was launched recently, ran for 3 months in 3 cities, namely, NCR, Mumbai and Bangalore. Around 36 key ITES-BPO companies and nearly 15,000 graduates participated in the pilot.
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