Amidst slowdown young students and professionals must focus on skill building

In a time of economic slowdown, IT ITES students must pick up industry-specific skills during their college days, rather than expecting to be trained after they join their first job.“You need ready-to-go skills…You need to be ready to start work with just two weeks training,” Slodown is an opportunity to inject a much-needed dose of optimism about the Indian IT sector among the student population. “In the first half of this (financial) year, from April to September, IT posted 24 per cent growth. While job addition may be slow, there will still be job growth. We’re expecting 100,000 to 150,000 new jobs in the IT sector this year, IT sector had been hit by a “double whammy”: the economic slowdown and the “corporate terrorism” in the form of the Satyam fiasco. In such a situation, students had to change their expectations. “You may think that ‘why should I bother to get extra training now. The company will give me training’. But times have changed…IT industry used to give you six months’ training after fresh students joined. But the people who get jobs now will be those who have employable skills when they join,” Skills is the new global currency and not degree or experience.

Three top skills
I strongly infrastructure management, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and software engineering with domain knowledge as three of the major areas in which students should acquire skills in order to be employable in the IT industry today. “Infrastructure management is a $11 billion industry…I estimate that it can employ five lakh people over the next few years,” .With regard to ERP skills, he suggested that students use their time in college to understand business applications and the way that businesses work. Similarly, software engineering is not just about knowing programming languages, but about being able to architect a system, he said. I admit that while students from premier institutions such as Pune University were unlikely to suffer from the slowdown, those from second-line institutions would face a rougher time. The top 20 per cent of engineering graduates would remain easily employable, while the bottom 20 per cent had few chances. However, it is the 60 per cent in between, who snapped up IT jobs with mediocre skills in the good times, who would have to work hard on their skills to be able to survive the downturn.