US firm using India model to create IT jobs for women

A leading Information Technology (IT) services company is using a programme developed in India to create jobs worldwide and train and place minority women in high-quality IT jobs in 10 cities across America.

After its "impressive work" in India, Mexico and the US, Aliso Viejo, California-based UST Global, is planning to launch additional programmes in Africa in 2015, according to its India-born Chief Executive Officer Sajan Pillai.

"UST Global has successfully trained over 20,000 college graduates throughout the world, including approximately 15,000 in India alone," and is currently deploying in Spain, Malaysia and the Philippines, among others, Pillai told IANS in an email interview.

For over 14 years, UST Global has refined its training programme to equip associates with the necessary skills required to be successful in providing technology services, he said.

"We aim for this to be a global occurrence where we continue to create jobs for people and countries in need," said Pillai, a computer science and engineering graduate from the College of Engineering at Thiruvananthapuram in India.

"In large part due to our reputation and success in India, the government of Mexico invited UST Global to establish a Centre of Excellence, in partnership with former president Vicente Fox, to train 30,000 students," he said.

Ten thousand of these will be employed by UST Global, Pillai said. As of October this year over 900 Mexican university graduates have completed the training programme and about 600 are now working for UST Global.

In the US, UST Global's Step IT Up America (SIUA) programme has already graduated over 200 women in six different cities and all are currently employed by UST Global, said Pillai, co-founder of Softek Systems in India.

New York was the latest city to join the programme recently. The grand vision of the programme is to create 5,000 new jobs for minority women to enter tech careers by 2020, Pillai said.

Asked how the model has been adapted for the US, he said: "After seeing the success and how societies transformed in Mexico, India, and other parts of the world, there was no doubt we would be able to do the same thing in the US."

To refine the material for the Step IT Up America students, UST Global is working in conjunction with Mentor Global, an international technology training company.

"These formulas are different, but the end goal is always the same. We aim to transform lives through technology," Pillai said.

Information technology and other STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) occupations are the largest and fastest-growing career sectors worldwide, especially in the US, he said.

Yet the number of trained people required to fill technology jobs always falls short.

Along with this talent gap, the technology industry's biggest challenge is severe under-representation of women and minorities in the fields of STEM.

Some 27 percent of the US workforce is made up of minorities and women; yet only three percent of STEM jobs are held by minorities, Pillai noted.

"We aim to move the needle of this issue through our nationwide initiative, Step IT Up America," he said, "as we continue our launches in other cities in the US".

So far, the majority of SIUA's students have been of African American and Latina ethnicities, said Pillai who was recently chosen as one of the elite 100 CEO Leaders in STEM by STEMConnector.

But the programme remains open to all minority women residing in 10 cities across the US, he said.