Growth in IT industry to spur trained personnel requirement

Allaying the fears of students about job opportunities in the IT sector,
Kiran Karnik, President, NASSCOM said there has been an ‘upsurge in
recruitment’ this year, with the IT industry need-ing close to 1,50,000
trained personnel to meet their dema-nds. He stated that despite the recession,
India’s IT industry has been registering a growth of 26 percent every year, as
compared to negligible or no growth in other countries and this has spurred this
increased demand.

He was speaking at the inauguration of C-DAC’s ‘Com-mon Campus Placement
Pro-gram’ (CCPP) for its students. He added that the initiative would not only
help students in having so many IT companies to come together and recruit but
help the industry as well.

He was of the opinion that since C-DAC already had the necessary linkages,
NASSCOM could provide the information on areas such as the demand for IT
professionals, say two years from now. He said, "NASSCOM could assist in
facilitation and leave the rest to training institutes like C-DAC."

On the IT industry, Karnik opined that the industry was ‘doing extremely
well’ gross-ing around $ 10 billion last year. He said that this year, the IT
industry was targeting a figure of $ 12 billion in exports alone, further
expressing the hope that figure should touch the $ 50 billion mark by 2008.

Karnik also sought to clear myths associated with the BPO sector. While
agreeing that a majority of the sector remains non-technical, he pointed out
that there were organizations, which were coming up for specialized domain areas
such as bioinformatics, equity analy-sis of industries and so on.

However, according to him, Indian IT professionals had some homework to do in
terms of soft skills, which has become a vital prerequisite these days, he
observed.

CCPP is a C-DAC ACTS’ end-eavor to bring its students on a common platform
for the en-tire IT industry. As many as 39 IT organizations are reported to have
confirmed their partici-pation in the two-week place-ment program that concludes
on February 8, 2004.

CyberMedia News Service

Pune