Collaborate with the IT industry to remain competitive

India’s information technology success story is more than 25 years old now. The journey has been incredible — from offshore, low-end coding shops primarily driven by Y2K to a $200 billion industry that contributes nearly 8% to the GDP.

A recent report by NASSCOM estimates that the industry still has significant room for growth. So the question we should ask: How should the IT industry prepare itself to exploit this opportunity in the coming decades.

A competitive position

An article in Management Review published by Indian Institute of Management Bangalore indicated that quality education offers India the biggest competitive edge in the IT sector.

However, in a global economy where other countries are fast catching up, this advantage cannot be taken for granted.

Lakhs of students get an engineering degree each year but the lack of industry-oriented skills means that less than 20% get employment in their core domain.

Further, India ranks quite low on the Knowledge Economy Index, which uses various parameters to measure a country’s ability to “generate, adopt and diffuse knowledge”.

Given the state of affairs, both the industry and educational institutions need to collaborate to bridge the gap between educational institutions and the needs of the industry.

This effort can further be supplemented with a semester of immersive outcome-based, evaluation-based apprenticeship in industries.

The focus of the technical education curriculum also needs a paradigm shift.

Some essential areas of improvement include:

Business innovation: From being a mere system of record till 2005 (enterprise resource planning) to business optimisation (supply chain optimisation), the IT industry has entered the next phase — Business innovation. As such, our education also needs to focus on enhancing customer experience and ways to drive growth through customer value creation.

Move beyond coding languages: IT education needs to move beyond teaching coding languages like Java, J2EE and Python to helping students solve business problems in a simulated real-world development environment. This can be done by getting them to build user-friendly interfaces, ensuring minimum glitches in applications they build or even optimising the routes and inventories.

Industry-specific knowledge: A frequent concern by global customers is that IT professionals have little idea about the industry verticals they build applications for, whether it is banking and finance, telecom or even oil and gas. This gap can be bridged by imparting end-to-end industry vertical specific business processes knowledge through subject matter experts from these core industry verticals.

Global processes: Imparting knowledge of industry and geography specific process and legal compliances, whether it is taxation or data protection is important.

Institutions can work to provide an emphasis on data security frameworks, protocols, standards, agile ways of working, documentation and knowledge management, project risk management, business use cases, and themes like innovation and continuous improvement.

Look forward: Introduction to emerging areas such as design thinking, systems thinking, customer centricity, human-centric computing and a host of other emerging digital technology concepts is also important.

To sum up, a well-directed, collaborative effort between educational institutions and the industry is a sure way of ensuring that India’s advantage of human resources is sustained among the comity of nations in the emerging global knowledge economy.

(The author is a program manager at an IT company)