NIIT CEO Rahul Patwardhan recently in a press interaction at Chitnavis Centre, Nagpur, spoke about various challenges the IT sector is currently facing. He even addressed the present issue of engineering colleges, which are primarily responsible for the lack of skilled IT professionals. Parwardhan primarily emphasised on the need of skill development training for all IT students and employees for better productivity. Patwardhan, who spoke on the topic ?An urgent call to action: India’s youth face a clear and present danger, at length told how NIIT plans to tackle this issue.

The IT sector is facing threat where the profit margins are coming down and hiring freshers has become a problem. Process automation and use of intelligence bots to take over repetitive tasks, is hollowing out the workforce in many firms for the legacy type of work. This is further impacting the hiring of freshers, and also resulting in an increasing trend of structural layoffs under the garb of performance based retrenchment. Patwardhan said. Adding further, he said, The work in IT firms is based on digital skills which is a challenge before the workers in performing well since the curriculum in colleges lacks learning science and technology.

Speaking about the flawed education pattern and lack of efficient skill imparting system in engineering colleges, he said, IT firms are finding it difficult to find adequate supply of fresh talent with the required new digital skills, as India’s universities are still delivering curriculum that is outdated. Companies have to invest in retraining freshers.

To solve this problem, NIIT has come up with a programme – Stack Route Immersive (SRI). SRI was a three-month work experience training programme with an intake of 72 students per batch but was unable to cater to the huge need of re-skilling the existing workforce and undergraduates, said Patwardhan. NIIT also plans to launch DigiNXT, which is created as an outcome of SRI to service the needs of the fresh graduates who want to equip themselves with digital skills and thereby improve the chances of getting a good job and a better salary.

Rina Sinha from NIIT Nagpur was also present during the interaction.