It all adds up

L.N. Revathy

THE name of the game is value-addition, a concept that dominates business and even perhaps personal relationships in unimagined ways today.

Take the case of the IT industry. The talent demand-supply equation is yet to reach a balance. To supplement the Government's initiative, private training schools have emerged. Training institutes such as NIIT, Aptech, SSI and Radiant have set up franchisees across the country and are shaping up into virtual universities.

But what kind of student has the competitive edge and what kind of IT recruits are the corporates looking for?

Here's what some training institutes have to say;

The Dr. Mahalingam College of Engineering and Technology (MCET) at Pollachi, near Coimbatore, houses an ``IT Cafeteria'' within its campus. Besides schools such as NIIT, the campus houses the Apple Distinguished School established through the Apple Consortium, Australia, the Accel IT Academy for Hardware servicing and network training, VLSI, Autodesk Education Partnership Programme for Autocad, Ansys Design Space, etc, to enable students to undergo value-added training.

According to C. Ramaswamy, Principal, MCET, value-added content has become a necessity today. Big players such as TCS demand highly-trained candidates, even at the stage of campus recruitment, he says. ``Such demands from industry circles have necessitated that even the core group of engineering students take to value-added training.''

Besides professional candidates, science and arts graduates also avail the training as they fit well into the middle-level management cadre.

But one negative fallout of this is that students passing out with the edge of value-added training prefer high-flying jobs abroad or in the metros, rather than taking up assignments in Coimbatore.

Entrepreneurs and techno-park promoters contend that there is no dearth of technical manpower in Coimbatore because of the number of educational institutions in and around it. The CII is marketing Coimbatore as ``the ideal IT destination,'' but the results have been rather slow.

Like Coimbatore, other secondary towns such as Madurai, Salem and Tiruchy have also not emerged as ``IT hubs'' although industry circles feel there is enormous potential in these places. The absence of major IT players in these cities is telling.

What about those who opted to stay back? These professionals feel they've not done as well as college mates who moved away. They also lament that their pay package is abysmally low, going by industry standards.

But unfazed by such trends, KG Information Systems Ltd (KGISL), which has established an IT training school on the outskirts of Coimbatore, believes in grooming candidates without dilution of value. ``We don't believe in the franchisee model,'' says its Director, Ashok Bhakthavatsalam.

The company imparts hands-on training on all platforms to students in its techno-campus. Only after successful completion of the modules are they absorbed by the company.

But while the company takes pains to make its training rigorous, albeit for a fee, retaining talent is becoming a big problem, says Bhakthavatsalam. IT staff have a history of being more loyal to their profession rather than to their current employer and can't resist the impulse to move on. However, here too, there's the other side of the picture. Some of the skilled ones say just snagging interviews with reputed companies is difficult. These firms don't want them unless they are clones of a perfect model, they say.

Training, both for existing staff and new recruits, is an important factor in retaining staff, for no one wants to do boring, repetitive work, says KGISL.

But building a talented IT pool need not be impossible. Wentworth Research has reported that by paying attention to the three `R's, namely, retention, retraining and recruiting, the odds can weigh significantly in the company's favour.

The final piece in the jigsaw, according to Wentworth Research, is a four pronged-approach: to retain those staff with the right skills, to retrain others with the desired skills, to retrain or release those lacking the needed skills and recruiting new staff to fill the gaps.

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