Communication skills and dearth of technology centric courses are primary challenges in the IT industry which need to be attended to at the earliest. This will increase the employment opportunities for the Indian youth wanting to join technology-based companies says, Ashok B
The youth today are amazingly receptive to the changing job market scenario and keep themselves updated on the upcoming technologies and their career options across industries, both nationally and globally. They gather detailed information on the opportunities, which the domains and the courses of their choice offer, before enrolling.
On the other side, communication skills and dearth of technology centric courses are the primary challenges in the industry that needs to be attended immediately to make the Indian youth more employable in IT. Students need to improve their communication skills, as most jobs demand them to not only interact with the customers but also lead their team members at work. Programmes should come with supplementary courses enabling students to improvise their communication skills right at their student level. This not only improves their level of confidence but also makes them presentable and capable managers at their firms.
India is the third fastest growing app market in the world after the US and Europe. NASSCOM states that there are 9,000 app development companies in India which have emerged in the last three years.
Mobile app development courses offer career opportunities in small, medium and large professional IT companies, enterprise application product and services companies, mobile application product and service companies, VAS providers, e-commerce, m-commerce, Internet companies, etc. Apart from the mobile apps course, the IT Infrastructure Management courses are also on demand and offers career opportunities in desktop support services management, server and backup management, network management, database management administration, messaging system, security services management, storage management and virtual private network services.
Cyber security has immense job opportunities in corporate; banking, finance services and insurance sector; defence and police; governance and legal department as cyber fraud consultant or managers. Information security, compliance, business continuity plan, IT and IS Audit (internal and external) software development are opportune areas in the corporate sector. Other interesting job arenas are in research and development, investigation and forensics, IT infrastructure security at India’s defence and police department. Cyber forensics consultants, cyber law expert, expert witness are very high profile job segments where cyber security specialists are in high demand. Ethical hacker, penetration testers, cyber fraud detectives has increasing demand for talents. The starting salary for the freshers will be approximately Rs2.25 lakhs per annum.
Today courses are required to be designed keeping the industry needs and standards in mind. We have industry experts who are willing to give their valuable feedback to the new industry aspirants and are joining corporate educational enterprises as academic heads and mentors representing the industry. They are actively involved in the design and formulation of these courses. leveraging this huge opportunity, students can have a unique experience.
The mainstream traditional academic courses offered by our very own Indian universities have an industry-academia disconnect and the youth ends up gaining poor quality skills. Realising this grave issue, numerous entrepreneurial ventures in the educational corporate segment are emerging who are roping in industry experts.
They are designing updated industry relevant full time courses in offbeat sectors like IT Infrastructure Management Services (ITIMS), IT Information Security Management Services (ITSMS), IT storage and cloud technology, mobile app technology. These are being offered as full time degree and post graduate programmes.
The industry reports on employability gap states breach in three areas — inadequate soft-skills, irrelevant academic learning and the candidate’s inability to apply academic learning to his dream job. Internships needs to be for minimum six-months duration to understand the industry at ground level.
Secondly, it gives the organisation quality time to comprehend and better its comfort level in terms of working with the employees.
Tips on How to skill
Students must opt for courses designed on industry requirements.
large percentage of training should be done through the practical mode, which is using lab exercises and case studies.
E-learning support is a must for all the important topics.
Students should opt for collaborative learning.
Students must update themselves with the latest technologies in the industry.
Focus on practical learning — 40 per cent theory and 60 per cent practical training.
Students must have end-to-end project training experience and not just coding lessons.
Students should prepare for the International vendor certifications (CCNA, MCSE etc) simultaneously.
Audio-visual aids based training supplemented by notes is effective.
Frequent classroom interaction with industry experts. Today, IT course designers are making the students undergo projects with a real world experience through their courses. The focus is on the live projects and exercises to help them develop performance skills and deliver outputs from day one of joining an organisation.
The writer is academic head and mentor, IT, iNurture education solutions