That the Information Technology (IT) and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) sectors are on a roll is no longer news. The sectors indeed are booming and with them the job market.
Thanks to the burgeoning demand for skilled human resources, allied sectors, most notably the IT education provider market is on an upswing.
Students, fresh graduates and those still in college, and IT employees keen on upgrading their skills at the numerous computer training institutes across the capital are flocking the classrooms.
The IT education market has grown by three per cent to reach Rs.4,983 crore in financial 2009-10, says G. Raghavan, president – Individual Learning Solutions, NIIT, one of the leading IT education providers. NIIT has led the sector with a 24 per cent market share in the same period.
Following a brief lull during the height of economic recession around the globe, the institutes are back to doing brisk business. Over the last couple of months, the many institutes in what is popularly referred to as ‘United States of Amerpeet' after many students of the institutes' here who made their careers in USA, are once again bustling with activity.
Java, being one of the most popular object oriented languages ever built, enjoys huge demand from the industry (and hence the students), as does Microsoft .Net that allows developers to make intelligent applications with interoperability across platforms in a limited timeframe. Microsoft Sharepoint is another very popular course in the market right now.
The various IT education institutes are offering motley of courses from Apache Struts, one of the best third party Java frameworks in the market, Hibernate (a persistent framework in which Java programme can sleep, in layman terms), Spring (part of J2EE to implement Model View Controller architecture) to Ajax (used in most major websites for dynamic updating of pages), Essbase (Extended spreadsheet database), Datastage and Abinitio.
If you want to work on the cutting edge technologies currently in the market, it is iPhone Apps, Google Android, Oracle Apps and Customer Relationship Management (CRM, a strategy for managing a comapany's interactions with customers, clients and sales prospects) that are driving the market. Poised to lead the market, these courses along with open source technologies like Drupal (a content management system) and Liferay (enterprise portal) are currently considered niche in the IT job market, according to Srinivas Patnaik, Managing Director, Aspire Info Labs, an IT finishing school that trains associates on technologies specifically required by companies, makes them IT-ready and later deploys them in the industry. “There is always a demand-supply [gap] for the niche courses right now,” he says, “We are trying to bridge this gap but the demand is always there.”
Within the IT training market, individual training segment recorded a turnover of Rs. 1,370 crore; e-Learning grew four per cent with Rs.1,721 crore in the year and corporate training grew by five per cent to reach Rs.1,892 crore, adds Mr. Raghavan.
Although the business has not reached pre-recession levels, it has definitely picked up by at least 50 per cent, says K. Hari Prasad Rao, managing director, Sun Mars. Some of the courses in demand he identifies are Unix Administration technologies like Sun Solaris, HP-Unix, IBM-AIX, and database administration courses like Oracle 11g and Resource Allocation Clusters (RAC). While recommending these courses for engineering and MCA graduates, he suggests networking and Windows administration courses for other degree holders.
“Some of the tools have always been there. But they are getting better and better,” says Puran B Kalapala, an IIT graduate who has trained students at an IT finishing school that grooms students for IT industry. “These are being used on a larger scale in a better framework.”
