With the ever-increasing need and trend of upskilling employees across jobs, the National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom’s) FutureSkills platform has trained over 3,80,000 candidates till date.

The FutureSkills initiative platform was launched by Nasscom in early 2018 with a target to upskill 40 lakh IT employees in its initial phase in technologies such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, robotic process automation, internet of things, big data analytics, 3D printing, and cloud computing. The idea, quite ahead of its time saw many takers in 2020 when the pandemic hit.

FutureSkills was started as a B2B focussed platform accessible only to Nasscom’s 3,000 members and their employees. It is now a B2C platform and can be used by anyone.

“From Nasscom’s perspective, we have been focused on skilling, upskilling and reskilling since 2016. We were early to focus on the skillsets needed to work towards digital transformation. Skills of the current industry employees and academia weren’t matching up with what was required,” Sangeeta Gupta, Senior Vice-President and Chief Strategy Officer, Nasscom, told BusinessLine .

She added, “We started with the FutureSkills as a B2B platform which was meant for our members to upskill their employees. But as digital became more mainstream and the government showed interest, we partnered with MeitY and launched the FutureSkills Prime initiative, a platform open to everybody who wants to join.”

Tie-ups

Nasscom partnered with several top technology product companies for the courses. These include companies such as Microsoft for Cloud and AI, Salesforce for CRM, AWS for courses on Cloud Architecture and Cisco for Cybersecurity.

The courses are then broken into parts based on the difficulty levels and specific topics a user would want to view. There are smaller topic-focussed courses depending on what you want to learn, starting from as basic as ‘What is AI?’ to the advanced AI courses.

“Given the over-information and flooding of content around everything on the internet, we have curated and hand-picked these courses. We have seen great traction. As of now, we have seen 380,000 students who have enrolled on this platform. Completion rate of courses is around 34-35 per cent, which means one-third of the enrolments are completing the courses,” Gupta said.

Interest from non-tech partners

“One type of partnership is core product companies coming up with certification courses and the second type is edtech companies and others who have built scale. For foundation courses on product engineering or product management, a lot of industry practitioners from diverse companies have come together to curate product management 1:1 courses,” Gupta said.

Nasscom has been witnessing interests from several non-technology companies including Apollo Hospitals, Vedanta and Welspun. These businesses traditionally have been non-tech but are now understanding how their business models will get disrupted by technology in the near future.

“Companies like Welspun are saying they now understand that their traditional businesses will get disrupted, and they at least need to be digitally fluent. They want to understand how their businesses will get impacted by AI. Their employees are learning from these courses. The companies will ask their employees to do certain hours of learning from FutureSkills and combine with their own solutions at factories,” Gupta said.

While Nasscom has been in talks with other countries who want to adopt FutureSkills platform too, Gupta said that they would want to focus on enabling the Indian market first.

comment COMMENT NOW