The Hindu Business Line : Multimedia courses evoke interest in Chennai

, Animation, network engineering and embedded systems are some of the programmes that are driving computer training institutes in Chennai now while it used to be e-commerce and Java earlier.

Multimedia is one area that has been generating tremendous interest. "The intake of students at our Adyar centre has jumped from 100 students to 150 this year," said Mr S. Karthik, Head, Technology and Marketing division, Arena Multimedia, Adyar.

He feels this is because media related software requires only basic familiarity with computers, unlike other software driven courses. Arena's 18-month course in animation, priced at around Rs 65,000 is seeing more demand compared to other short-term courses the institute provides.

Another area of interest is Mechanical Engineering-based design. "Our masters programme targeted at 2nd year Mechanical, Civil and Architecture students is popular," says Mr S. Karaiadiselvan, Director, CADD Centre and Training Services, Chennai.

In the IT industry, the popular courses seem to be hardware and network engineering. Embedded systems and VLSI design courses are also seeing increased demand. These courses have flexible fee structure ranging from Rs 4,500 to Rs 48,000 and can be customised depending on individual needs.

Student inflow rising

These courses may not be seeing the same rush that Java, C++ and e-Commerce saw some years ago, but student inflow has been steadily rising over the last year, according to industry experts.

Arena Multimedia trains about 150 students daily and registers at least three new students a day. CADD Centre has registered 180 students for the present batch of the Masters course and has so far trained around 35,000 students. The inflow of students this year is marginally higher than that of last year, the academics cell of CADD centre said. Accel IT Academy has about 10,000 alumni and its academics division says it has seen 20 per cent increase in demand for embedded systems and 15 per cent for network engineering.

The nature of most courses requires prior theoretical knowledge making it focused towards a certain student community.

Corporate interest

But corporates are also increasingly availing themselves of the services of these institutes in select projects.

IT training institute Digiterati regularly trains employees from Cognizant, Satyam, Wipro and Infosys. "We have batches of about 50-60 students who train with us for 40-45 days on select software," says Mr Ravikumar Parthasarathy, Director, Digiterati. He says freshers mainly do basic courses as part of their induction, while experienced employees are part of customised modules that are of interest to their projects at work.

Apart from students pursuing visual communications, Arena has trained employees from CLRI, Department of Fisheries, Tamil Nadu, and Wipro. For other courses the focus is graduate engineering and computer applications students, typically in their penultimate or final year. Institutes also train corporate employees regularly though this does not form a large part of their target audience.

But with software training as an integral part of college curriculum, what value addition do these institutes provide?

"We provide high end software that is not available in engineering colleges," says Mr Karaiadiselvan. The academics division at Accel IT says that faculty in colleges do not have real time experience of working with software and students are taught mainly theory, unlike their institute where faculty is internationally certified. Mr Parthasarathy has trained faculties of many universities and feels there is a gross mismatch of college curriculum to industry standards. "Certified courses ensure global employment for students," he says.

However, the popularity of these courses is mainly due to the attraction of placement assistance. Though institutes declined to give exact placement figures, around 60 per cent of students are placed in each course.

The rest find employment as teachers within the same institute.

Arena is improving on this aspect by introducing a development unit where students will get to work on projects offered by corporates and advertising agencies. This is aimed at increasing placement options for students.

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