For a fee of Rs85,000, students are given a laptop, complete course material and a promise they will acquire new skills, including cutting edge software development, and an IT job at the end of the course. In the first month, students at Raman have already been given some grounding in soft skills, including dressing and conduct in a corporate environment.
“The corporate environment is simulated in the classroom. No casuals and Mondays are tie days,” says Mahesh. The next stage of the programme, which will begin shortly, involves technical training.
Mahesh says he already can perceive some changes. “I used to be very introverted, but now I am beginning to open up,” he says.
According to Suchita, the finishing school has generated a lot of government interest.
“We have requests from the Union government as well as state governments to set up similar schools across the country,” she says, adding these plans could take some time to materialize.
Nasscom, too, has been attempting to involve the government in setting up such finishing schools for the tech sector. Earlier this year, it successfully lobbied the ministry of human resources development, which oversees education, to participate in setting up informal finishing schools at seven National Institutes of Technology—including in Warangal, Suratkal, Durgapur, Kurukshetra and Allahabad. The objective was to offer short-term courses on specific technologies in demand—embedded software development used in gadgets such as cellphones, for example.
“If we have a larger number of students graduating with the desired skills, the whole industry stands to benefit. Currently, most of the smaller companies are hamstrung because they don’t have the right talent,” says Sahrawat.
In the next phase, Nasscom hopes to expand the programme to other institutes. Prasanta Bora, alumni coordinator of the North East Professional Institutes Forum, a body of 11 engineering and management institutes in the North-East, says he looks forward to such schools coming up in the region.
“We found that our students lack in certain departments. They are not very good at group discussions or in the personal interviews,” he says. Last year, the forum managed to place only about 120 students of the total 700 students that graduated from these institutes.
Training company Dale Carnegie Training-Walchand PeopleFirst Ltd is exploring entering such regions to provide locals the necessary skills to get jobs. The first Walchand Dale Carnegie Finishing School, which will shortly commence operations in Bangalore, is being set up with the support of the Karnataka government. It recently took part in an employability summit in Kohima to explore opportunities in the North-East.
“The real India is in the non-metros and that’s where a big chunk of the talent is,” says Raj Bowen, chief executive of the company. “But this talent needs to be equipped with the right skills... we are also in exploratory dialogues with several other state governments as well as universities and business houses,” he adds.
The NIIT Education Society, a not-for-profit organization of NIIT Ltd, has begun an initiative to impart tech skills to students in urbanizing India. The society set up a district learning centre in Chhindwara, Madhya Pradesh, to provide intensive training programmes to more than 200 students a year.