India Inc has long been talking about the employability quotient of engineering graduates, management students as well as existing employees, and the need to train them again.
Ozone Education Consultants, a Pune-based educational consultancy, has embarked on a novel initiative to boost employability in MBA Schools and engineering institutions in the country.
In addition to academic institutions, Ozone has started work with companies across a wide spectrum - an IT major, a leading conglomerate with interests in financial services and real estate and a US-based IT services company.
Participating educational institutions include the Indira Group in Pune, The Chetana group in Mumbai, Audyogik Shiksha Mandal in Pune and Chanakya Institute of Management Studies and Research, Mumbai.
Ozone has mentored about 3,500 students every year from these 11 educational institutes.
“Mentoring and employability is not just restricted to colleges and students but also to corporates,'' said Shantanu Sen Sharma, co-founder at Ozone. He added that the industry is rethinking on its approach with respect to bulk recruitment of fresh students.
For example, in the case of an IT professional, an average fresher is currently 'billable' only after 6-7 months, resulting in potential billability loss of more than $3,500 per month per employee.
Moreover, an IT student will probably understand the technicalities of say cloud computing, but would he be equally comfortable with how retail or telecom clients can leverage cloud computing for their business, asked Sharma.
Armed with 35 mentors, Ozone plans to gradually scale this up to other centres and more institutes in the coming years. There is also a plan to get corporates to pre-select candidates who can then be trained as per the company’s requirements, even as they are finishing their management programme. This would enable cutting down on the learning curve while on the job itself.