Skills Upgradation In Indian IT Sector: The Need Of The Hour.

USD 245 billion Indian technology sector has identified an employability gap among engineering graduates, claiming that the school system does not focus on developing robust fundamental, professional skills.

Debjani Ghosh, head of the technology industry association Nasscom, told reporters that a skills gap causes IT businesses to spend more time training new employees before they are sent to industries, resulting in huge expenditures. According to Ghosh, engineers today are no longer working in the back office but alongside customers as the business transitions from service provider to digital transformation partner. The current educational system does not focus on creating efficient interpersonal abilities or developing design thinking (expertise), out-of-box thinking, or problem-solving, she argued. 

For the last two decades, Indian IT businesses have provided services to the rest of the globe as a result of cost arbitrage and the large number of engineering graduates that the nation produces each year. Yet, the shifting nature of the standards appears to have resulted in disappointments, which mandates the need for skills upgradation.

Ghosh says she expects the newly-launched New Education Policy will remedy this weakness and will encourage the authorities to execute the upskilling program fast.

Normally, the sector seeks basic capabilities in areas like artificial intelligence and cyber security, as well as deep technical knowledge and professional skills such as the ability to express ideas, interact with people, and think creatively. Ghosh stated that the school system is responsible for providing graduates with fundamental and professional skills, which appears to be missing at the moment.

Sabeer Bhatia, the developer of Hotmail and an entrepreneur, expressed his unhappiness earlier in the day at the ceremony. He claims that the school system discourages children from asking questions. It shouldn’t only be about getting good grades and getting a career for the kid, he says.

Bhatia’s remarks come at a time when upskilling in new technologies is rapidly becoming a part of the public dialogue in India about job development. India is headed towards a creative economy, and India is unprepared for it, Bhatia, co-founder of Showreel, said at the NASSCOM Technology and Leadership Conference 2023. The educational system does not stimulate creative thinking. He has a plan to create 50-60 million employment by investing in a million new ideas.

Let the young envision the future. Finance their ideas; 90% of them will fail, but the 10% that succeed will generate $20-40 trillion for banks. All of the employees were produced through new and inventive concepts. 90% of India’s energy is currently invested in imitation ideas. In Silicon Valley, none of the ideas that produced $30-40 trillion in wealth were ordinary, he continued. Bhatia feels that the ‘Make in India’ narrative is out of date and that it was more relevant in the 1980s when China seized on it.

Even if India is successful in recruiting global manufacturing, it would only have roughly 100,000 additional employees by the end of the year, according to Bhatia.

Upgrading skills of Freshers.

Let us now acknowledge the pioneering name in the Indian IT sector, Narayana Murthy. Murthy stated that Infosys recognized early on that young engineer graduating from India’s engineering institutes required gaining skills. He went on to say that they saw as early as 1996-97 that the freshers lacked the necessary skills to be beneficial to Indian firms. As a result, Infosys implemented the world’s biggest corporate training program. Infosys could teach 15,000 employees for a 24-week program on any given day. They could train 30,000 individuals in a year.

The ChatGPT Effect.

But what about the difficulties that AI systems like ChatGPT provide for beginning coders? The popular “ask me anything” chatbot, developed by Microsoft Corp.-backed OpenAI, blasts out lines of code in seconds.

They are not in danger of losing their employment, according to Murthy. Humans had something called program generators around 1977-78. Everyone predicted that the youth would lose their employment. It did not materialize because the human mind is the most adaptable tool, according to Murthy. All that happened was that individuals began to solve larger and larger problems that these program generators could not handle. ChatGPT is fantastic, and the human race should embrace it. But, we utilize ChatGPT as a base and then express our ideas, Murthy remarked.

The last line.

The need for digital technology—artificial intelligence, machine learning, data analytics, and cloud computing—has highlighted the need for Indian IT engineers to be reskilled. According to Nasscom, around 2 million of India’s 5.4 million IT workers are digitally proficient. 

Technology-based occupations evolve rather than change, and IT professionals should keep up with the trend by constantly learning and keeping track of these changes. Every year, the need for technology evolves, and one must constantly be prepared for that by upgrading their skills and competencies and hence marking the great Indian presence in the global platform.

Edited by Prakriti Arora