NASSCOM recently hosted a special Industry-Academia meet on Engineering Services, under the aegis of its Engineering Services Forum, a special interest group dedicated to building India's Engineering Services Outsourcing (ESO) capabilities and position the country as a preferred destination for these offerings.
The key objective of the NASSCOM Engineering Services Forum is to facilitate the growth of the engineering services industry in India through a series of initiatives and activities that focus on policy advocacy, industry research and outreach as well as
talent development.
The event, held in Chennai, was chaired and co-chaired by B V R Mohan Reddy, Chairman of the NASSCOM Engineering Services Forum and Krishna Mikkilineni
of Honeywell Technology Solutons Lab, respectively.
Since its formation, the Engineering Services Forum has been bringing together policy makers, the industry as well as academia to address the concerns of the sector.
The seminar in Chennai was focused on engaging the industry. and academia in a discussion on skills shortages faced by the engineering services sector and the need to create relevantly equipped engineering talent for the big ESO opportunity.
The aim of the meet was also to encourage industry and academia to brainstorm on the manpower challenges facing the engineering services segment and find solutions to redress them.
The special session of the forum was flagged off by a presentation by NASSCOM on 'Meeting Engineering Services Demand: Role of the Academia and Industry.' Quoting a Booz Allen & Duke University's Center for International Business Education & Research Report
2005, NASSCOM stated that while the existing market for Engineering Services Outsourcing stood at US$ 15 billion, it would rise to around US$ 150 billion by 2020. India had a sizeable opportunity in this space - around US$ 13 billion by 2010 and US$ 30 bill ion by 2020.
The crucial issue of engineering services resource supply is that around 575,000 engineering graduates pass out every year from 1,400 colleges, yet only seven percent are employable by the IT sector. The situation worsened in the engineering services segment, as these graduates were not equipped with relevant skill-sets for the market.
The engineering talent had to be product-oriented, with top-line impact. Additionally, it had to possess basic Math and engineering skills alongside domain expertise.
On a broader level, the industry and academia will have to take the following actions to improve the employability of engineering talent:
- Set up finishing schools to groom talent for the engineering services industry
- Introduce segment specific certifications (Academy programmes by industries)
- Launch application focused learning programmes
- Improve academia's affiliation with industry
- Introduce
relevant certifications,
diplomas and PG programmes Launch industry-academia collaborative programmes
- Get
companies
to
University
campuses
- Encourage industry to participate in curriculum and faculty development and mentoring programmes
- Launch online training
- Create 'Chairs' in institutes that
encourage R&D (some customers have taken the lead and set up a Chair at University of Hyderabad)
- Start dialogues with other industrial bodies and institutes such as poly-technics
- Encourage companies to sponsor M Tech programmes and draw faculty from abroad who are retired or in sabbatical, to help Indian institutes and students get international knowledge and expertise
- Build interactive online content and design tools to disseminate knowledge
- Encourage organisations to launch 'Train The Trainer' programmes to increase the supply pool
- Encourage companies to pool their resources and build labs to enable students to train on the prototypes and get first -hand, 'on-the-job' learning
- Introduce NAC for engineering services
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