Industry body Nasscom has urged the $130-billion Indian IT industry to eye the emerging ‘digital’ economy and arm the workforce with the required skill-sets.

As India's premier IT body gets ready to launch its Business Process Management (BPM) summit in Bengaluru, it is staring at two contrasting issues. “On the one hand there is a huge Y2K-like opportunity in digital as companies are starting to look at Indian companies to help them navigate through their digital journey,” KS Viswanathan, VP- industry initiatives, Nasscom told BusinessLine .

However, on the other hand, Viswanathan believes that the industry needs to re-skill its workforce in this domain, if this large opportunity has to be tapped. The industry is grappling with its inability to be prepared for using disruptive technologies such as cloud computing, social and mobile.

Some of the reasons corporations in developed world are starting to look at digital technologies is due to increasing adoption of smartphones, coupled with a changing user behaviour wherein transactions are happening from different kinds of devices. This has prompted multinational giants to open new captive centres in India, a trend which was set by GE in the 90s.

“Global businesses are adopting more omni channel methods and are profiling their customers more to get insights into their buying patterns and that is impacting the IT industry,” opines Viswanathan.

This change, in turn, has increased the need for engineers specialising in IoT, cloud, social, mobile and analytics.

New courses However, the skill-set gap is still considerable. To tackle this issue, Nasscom will be launching a course which engineering colleges can include in their curriculum, said Viswanathan. The course will include a focus on robotics and automation, which is starting to be widely embraced by companies across the world.

Additionally, security skill-sets will also be a part of the course, he added.

Industry watchers pointed out that including such courses is just the beginning. “What is taught is not important, how well it is taught is important,” says Prof S Sadagopan, Director, IIIT- Bangalore.

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