Knowledge Professionals and the Indian KPO Market: Government-Industry-Academia Linkages to Meet Demand for Skilled Personnel

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Initiatives have been taken by the industry, the government and the academic community to train the manpower to meet the specific demands to the industry. The industry currently has adopted a multi-pronged approach. It is hiring specialist expatriate talent, recruiting fresh graduates, training them and initiating close interaction with academia.

Some examples of alliances are:

• Hewlett-Packard (HP) has built an alliance with Jadavpur University. They collaborated to facilitate a mutual exchange of knowledge in mobile computing wherein HP will share industry knowledge on relevant IT innovations and promote talent through grants and fellowships. In addition, HP will also install the latest server technologies and provide IT infrastructure support for the computing lab.
• Cisco has set up more than 130 Networking Academies across 20 states and union territories in India that have more than 6,000 active students. Some of the colleges they have collaborated with are Banasthali Vidyapeeth, Anna University, IIIT Hyderabad and Bangalore, Thiagaraj College of Engineering and Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University.
• NASSCOM’s IT Workforce Development program (developed in early 2004) aims to bridge the gap in the demand and supply of knowledge workers by encouraging Industry–Academia partnerships. It has already conducted several industry-specific training programs across the country.
• NASSCOM has organized faculty training programs where faculty members are trained in various technologies such as Java conducted by Sun Microsystems and .Net conducted by Microsoft. It has offered 15 such programs across India, primarily in Tier II colleges, and has trained close to 500 faculty members to date.
• Apart from faculty members, NASSCOM has also focused on training students from Tier II cities such as Lucknow, Guwahati and Bhubaneshwar, which have been neglected in the past.

Although companies have taken the initiative to collaborate with academic institutions, it is primarily to deal with their internal requirements. Whether such individualized efforts will support the IT sector’s workforce shortage issue in the next five years is a question that can be answered only in time. However, consistent and efficient programs implemented by the government and the industry, along with academic institutions, may provide a solution to the shortage of knowledge workers in the future.

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