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Amidst the growing fear of shortage of skilled manpower to keep
up with growing demands of the IT industry, TCS, one of the leading players in
the business, has kick-started a program called Ignite, aimed at tapping science
graduates and grooming them to become software professionals. According to an
estimate, if offshore outsourcing work grows as predicted, in the next five
years, India stands the chance of falling short by 150,000 software engineers.
While companies like Infosys and Wipro have been hiring graduates on and off,
TCS has formalized the process.
Ignition On
Ignites pilot lasted seven months, and 500 trainees inducted into TCS. The
process of identifying these new graduates started in March 2006, and was
completed by December 2007. The company aims to scale up to hire 2,000 science
graduates in the current financial year.
The training program before induction was based on intensive
training on live projects. These graduates were selected from over 200 colleges
spread across nine states. Of these, more than 60% are women, some of them from
the northeastern states, which have not been on most companies radar for
sourcing talent. Another interesting aspect is that more than 65% are first
generation graduates in their families and most belong to tier-3 cities, class-C
towns, and villages.
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HR Status |
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The number of IT-BPO
professionals employed in India grew from less than 200,000 people in
1998 to over 1.6 mn in 2007, largely because of the countrys
demographic profile and network of high-quality academic institutions.
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India currently has
around 347 institutes of higher education and 16,885 colleges with a
total enrollment of over 9.9 mn. These produce around 495,000
technical graduates, nearly 2.3 mn other graduates and over 300,000
post-graduates every year.
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Even at the current
levels of employability, India has the largest pool of suitable
offshore talent, accounting for 28% of the total suitable talent pool
available across all offshore destinations.
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Indias emergence as a
preferred outsourcing destination has created the need for about 2.3
mn professionals by 2010. Based on current estimates, a shortage of
0.5 mn skilled knowledge workers may arise if remedial action is not
taken.
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Source: Nasscom |
The training begins with logic and problem-solving methods,
moves to their applications in the real world, and covers fundamental concepts
of various programming paradigms. Apart from pure IT, the curriculum also
focuses on soft skills, customer-orientation, and project management.
Talking about the idea behind the program, Raman Srinivas,
project head says, "We wanted to diversify the talent pool available to the
company by trying new methodologies to facilitate learning and create a new
architecture of socially inclusive growth."
Not Totally New
Though this is probably the first formal initiative by an IT company in
India, some have been hiring mathematics or science graduates for the last few
years. Bikramjit Maitra, senior vice president and head, HR, Infosys
Technologies says, "We have been hiring BSc students specializing in
mathematics and also physics, statistics, computer science, electronics, and IT
over the last few years. These numbers have been relatively less compared to
engineering graduates, but steadily growing."
Wipro Technologies has also been involved in innovative
initiatives through WASE (Wipro Academy of Software Excellence). The program,
set up in the year 1995, was aimed to prepare select BSc, BCA, and BCM students
to graduate them into software professionals. So, while the TCS program is of
seven months, Wipro initiates these graduates to pursue a four-year (eight
semesters) course in association with BITS, Pilani. But, obviously, the type of
skill-sets acquired through the longer program is different from what TCS will
be able to achieve. Page(s) 1 2
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