The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) had submitted an application before the University Grants Commission (UGC) seeking deemed university status for an educational arm it planned to set up four years ago.
While that application is still being processed, the CSIR has gone ahead and set up that educational arm called CSIR-AIST (Advanced Institute of Scientific Training), and its office has been functioning at Ghaziabad.
In the absence of a deemed university status, the CSIR-AIST will, as of now, not be able to award PhDs to research scholars working in various CSIR laboratories, but instead act as a ‘finishing school’ for fresh engineering graduates who can be groomed to be absorbed within the CSIR.
“Unless we focus on developing quality human resource, we would not be relevant. We need people with multi-dimensional skills to occupy future scientific space. So we have decided to create a separate wing for human resource development that will impart trans-disciplinary knowledge to the best scientific brains with an aim to create maximum intellectual property for the country,” said Prof Samir Kumar Brahmachari, director general of CSIR.
The engineering ‘finishing schools’ of CSIR-AIST are initially being set up in Chennai, Durgapur, Pilani and in either Delhi or Roorkee. Ultimately, the idea is to have an AIST attached to each of the 37 CSIR laboratories with a pan-India university status for advanced scientific training, in order to meet the growing shortfall of skilled manpower in industries.
In the IT context, the Finishing School concept is being jointly driven by Nasscom, the Ministry
of Human Resources Development (MHRD) and National Institute of Technology (NIT). As part of their initiative, pilot courses are to be conducted in eight centres — IIT-Roorkee and seven NITs, Calicut, Durgapur, Kurushetra, Jaipur, Surathkal, Tiruchi and Warangal.
What is a Finishing School?
Most people will assume that anyone with a degree in MBA, IT or law or any other subject possible sails through life smoothly. Statistics reveal that you require 15% technical skills and 85% social Etiquette, Business Etiquette & Dining Etiquette to make advancement in your career or personal life. What is the difference between one advocate and the other? One architect and the other? Both have Technical skills, but it is the art of carrying yourself off that makes you stand out.
Finishing School is a supplementary training school popular in India that attempts to make up for deficiencies of low-tier colleges by providing specialized vocational training in technical fields such as computer programming and information technology.
These IT finishing schools cover technical skills as well as communication and problem solving skills. The biggest advantage of these finishing schools is that these schools cut down the “deployable time” for a company.
Other finishing schools attempt to make up for deficiencies in the Indian secondary education system with regards to Mathematics and Science education and bring the student up to the level necessary for attending university and gaining admission. For instance, it is not uncommon for Indian students to spend an entire 1 to 2 years studying in a tutorial cram school after secondary education to gain entrance into a top Medical or Engineering school.
Western Countries are often flooded by extremely over-prepared and well networked Indian students, to the point of putting their own students at a disadvantage to their own rule and merit based college entrance and scholarship award systems where cram schools are virtually unknown, particularly in Engineering and Medicine, areas which the Indian cram school focus on.
“Finishing Schools help the IT industry by providing `industry-ready’ students with the necessary soft skills”, says a senior official of a software company. “Give me a person with good soft skills, I can make him a professional. He/she need not be very good in software, which we can teach.” Most software companies are looking to use the services of Finishing Schools.”, says an industry watcher.
Finishing school models
There are about 15 to 20 Finishing Schools functioning across the country. The purpose of Finishing Schools is basically for those who were not placed in campus and need that “extra” orientation and training. The CEO of Cognizant Technology Solutions, Mr. Laxmi Narayan, said that the key challenge was in scaling up the number of such schools. He expects several variants to the existing finishing school models to come up in long term.
Referring to the points that Mr Kiran Karnik, President, NASSCOM, had raised in an article in the media, Dr Chandramouli said, “The finishing school concept is commendable. But that alone might not be adequate. We need to address the problem of skills advancement in school itself. Doing it in the last four years of the candidates’ student life is not enough. If we start right from school, then we can make engineers substantially ready for industry when they graduate.”
The Pyramid approach
NASSCOM has taken the employment pyramid approach to better understand the industry’s skills requirement and create specific education and development initiatives basis that approach; most recent being working with Ministry of HRD to set up new IIITs and Finishing schools and extending NASSCOM Assessment of Competence (NAC) to IT services sector.
The base of the pyramid represents simple technical skills (including entry level jobs in the BPO industry and vocational jobs like networking, hardware maintenance, etc.). The middle stands for skills which are mainstream and account for the majority of the existing shortage in the industry, while the top of the pyramid, represents high-end technology skills (in areas such as bio-informatics, embedded software, product architecture, DSP, VLSI, program management and multimedia convergence), which are niche today, but will become mainstream in the near future.
NASSCOM’s Educational and Workforce enhancement initiatives
The Top end of the Pyramid
One of the biggest human-power challenges being faced at the level of higher-end education is the paucity of Ph.Ds and research scientists. Currently, post-graduate education is lagging behind undergraduate learning, with barely a handful of takers for the top-of-the-line Ph.D programs.
1. Set-up new IIITs - NASSCOM has been working with Ministry of Human Resource Development on a proposal to create “top of the pyramid,” highly specialized professionals with skill sets in emerging, “on-the-horizon” technologies that are not yet mainstream. These will typically include research in areas such as banking, insurance, analytics, remote sensing, water, agriculture, energy, transportation, environment, geosphere, natural sciences, nanotechnology, healthcare, networks and mobile computing, image processing, and cyber security, among others.
The aim of these institutions will be to:
· generate cutting-edge research and technology
· enhance and produce competent professionals and engineers
· incubate new companies and clusters
· nurture existing clusters of knowledge-based companies
Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) with support from NASSCOM and the IT industry has recommended the launch of five new IIITs (Indian Institutes of Information Technology), based on the Public-Private Partnership model, by the year 2008. In all, the Ministry of Human Research and Development aims to set up around 20 IIITs over the next few years.
The Middle level of the pyramid
This area represents the skills which are most commonly required by the IT services segment. It is also the market that is expected to face the largest skill shortage and a number of NASSCOM initiatives have been focused at this level.
1. NAC-Tech- Encouraged by the success of its Assessment and Certification program (NAC) for the BPO sector, NASSCOM is looking at offering a similar testing and accreditation offering, NAC-Tech, for the IT services sector starting this academic year. The aim is to make NAC-Tech an industry standard for evaluating students aspiring to find jobs in the technology/engineering industries. NAC-Tech will also help the industry, academic institutions and individual colleges to understand the potential of their students and determine their caliber, in terms of industry relevance and employability.
2. IT/Engineering Finishing School –
Another pioneering initiative by NASSCOM in partnership with the Ministry of Human Resource Development is the “Finishing Schools for Engineering Students” program, which is expected to enable young technical graduates to become industry-ready.
The “Finishing School” for engineering graduates who are still seeking employment has been launched in a pilot mode in May 2007. The pilot has been conducted during the summer months of May-June, 2007, for a period of eight weeks in eight institutions, including IIT Roorkee and seven NITs—Calicut, Durgapur, Kurukshetra, Jaipur, Surathkal, Trichy and Warangal.
The “Finishing School” is covering the curriculum provided on technical and soft skills development. The students will get an opportunity to reinforce some basic engineering skills and in addition, acquire industry-specific knowledge and skills, soft skills, and management and employment skills, which are being delivered by trained faculty and practicing IT and ITES industry consultants.
As part of the program, the students will also receive periodical feedback on their performance and undertake a final exam that highlights their ability in the area of rational, analytical thinking processes identified in a problem solving environment. The students will have the opportunity to take the NAC-Tech (NASSCOM Assessment of Competence–Tech), an employment benchmarking test and participate in a Job Fair.
3. The IT Workforce Development (ITWD) program-
The initiative was created keeping the issues and concerns of the industry at one end and challenges of the academia at the other end.
· As part of this initiative, NASSCOM has been nurturing the IT industry-academia interface through workshops and conferences, faculty sabbaticals, training programs and mentorship initiatives to ensure better synchronization between IT education and the industry requirements. The one-day industry-academia workshops for instance, have already been held in Kolhapur, Madurai, Tirupati, NCR, Dharwad, Coimbatore, Jaipur, Vizag, Lucknow, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Pune and Chennai. These have helped improve industry-academia interactions within different regions, enable a flow of information and discussion on the IT industry and create a plank for experience sharing. The faculty training workshops (or sabbaticals) are enabling faculty to realize the gaps in the present style of teaching and the approach to take in the core areas.
· As part of the mentorship program, IT companies are providing consistent and continuous guidance for over 12-24 months to a particular college(s)/institute(s) and enabling it to transform into a center where quality education is imparted.
· Closely working with academic bodies such MHRD, AICTE and UGC to standardize the curriculum and pedagogy
· Encouraging research and survey-oriented projects to showcase the best practices in the area of industry-academia alliances and developing White Papers on certain fundamental and critical requirements such as curriculum, information on engineering institutions and skills sets desired/available pan India.
The bottom of the pyramid
In order to develop entry-level human-power, especially for the BPO industry, and equip them with relevant hard and soft skills that ensure employability, NASSCOM has launched a key endeavor, the NAC.
1.NASSCOM’s Assessment of Competence (NAC)
- NAC was launched as an industry standard assessment and certification program to ensure the transformation of a “trainable” workforce into an “employable workforce” hence creating a robust and continuous pipeline of talent for the BPO sector.
NAC successfully completed its pilot phase in 2006 and was rolled out in Rajasthan where 2500 people took the NAC test. A job fair was held in association with the Department of Information Technology & Communication (DoIT&C) and Government of Rajasthan after the scores were released in Jaipur in March 2007.
Now NAC is being taken to the next level, by proliferating it across Tier II and Tier III cities and towns that can be strengthened into BPO hubs and used as playgrounds for nurturing job-ready professionals. By the end of the year, NAC will be rolled out in various states of India, including Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Chandigarh, Andhra Pradesh, North-Eastern States and West Bengal amongst others. In order to build a mindshare for NAC, awareness campaigns are being organized at colleges/universities in these regions, before the test is conducted. Students are being briefed about the BPO industry and the opportunities it offers in terms of jobs.
In the future, NAC will help align educational curriculum offered by universities and colleges in the country with the needs of the ITES-BPO sector. The initiative is also expected to help ITES-BPO players reduce their hiring costs, improve efficiencies, enlarge the candidate pool and perhaps more importantly reduce; if not remove the current escalation the market is seeing in entry level wages.
In these hard days of recession, Finishing Schools are to play a crucial role to groom the candidates and make them industry – ready as the Industry is looking for ‘ right candidates’ to perform right from the day 1 of their entry into workplace. Let us hope that irrespective of the model, the Finishing Schools will serve the purpose and reach their goals in the days to come.