BPO minnows start training centres to build talent pool- ITeS-Infotech-The Economic Times

BANGALORE/CHENNAI: Large companies in sunrise sectors such as IT/ITeS and retail have shown the way in investing in training and academic interventions to feed their huge manpower requirement. Now, much smaller and niche players are not hesitating to replicate the model as industry-ready talent is getting scarce. Minnows are investing in creating third-party training facilities to feed their own requirements and also convert their idle assets (machines and manpower) into a revenue stream.

Behind this trend is not just an economy growing at 8-9 % a year, but also the structural shifts that demand new sets of skills the current education system is not geared to meet. It is this skill void that is compelling even rank start-ups to put on the coach's hat, industry observers say. The start-up world is full of such examples such as The Writers' Block, Teleradiology Solutions, Comat and TutorVista. And these could just be tip of the iceberg.

Rajesh Shukla, the founder of The Writers Block, a Bangalore-based documentation outsourcing company, prefers to call the choice of a technical writer's job a "happy accident". This is because not many are aware of the field and those who do are not adequately trained. So, this start-up today has a parallel training school that has so far trained over 500 technical writers who have joined the likes of Infosys and Wipro apart from TWB itself. There would be a need for 50,000 technical writers in the country over the next five years, he says.

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A similar story is at play at Teleradiology Solutions, which reads MRI and CT scans of patients in the US at 30% lower cost. The Bangalore-based company, which dishes out medical reports in half an hour to manpower-strapped hospitals in the US and Singapore, is training radiologists and doctors in the art of reading these images. Again, the driver is captive need, which has been spun off into a revenue stream.

Says founder Dr Sunita Maheshwari: "There are only 10,000 radiologists in India while the number in the US is 25,000 for a population of 250 million." The company's recently launched training school, Rad Gurukul, is targeted at medical personnel and healthcare technologists.

Ditto with Tutorvista Global, an online tutoring services offering which links up teachers from small and large Indian cities to students in 13 countries. Says, Tutorvista founder K Ganesh: "We train teachers on communication skills, interactive learning, usage of computers apart from bringing them on the same level as the US curriculum." Tutorvista is now planning to offer this training programme as a separate service offering, targeted at the large and fragmented teacher community.

Comat Technologies, which is in egovernance and citizen services space, uses its assets (computer kiosks) during spare time to build an army of skilled workforce in low-end jobs. In fact, Comat is a feeder to temp major Teamlease and aims at supplying 5,000 such candidates per month to the recruitment agency going forward.

Ms Uma Karthikeyan, CEO of animation institute Pixel Academix, says the animation industry is growing at 30% a year, kicking up demand for 300,000 professionals in the next couple of years. Parent company, Sanra Software, which is into graphics, animation and gaming, is doing just that by looking at scaling up its training institutes to 20 cities.

It is not only in technology and new media that there is a rush to groom talent . Take the truck industry, for example. Truck manufacturers might be facing a bigger and less visible problem. There might not be enough qualified people to drive the trucks. Which is why Ashok Leyland has a driver's training institute at Namakkal, and more recently at Burari near Delhi.

Typically, the industry and eventually third-party players step in to fulfill the demand for training in new skills before they are integrated into mainstream education . Ten years ago, everybody rushed into IT training, but many of them have closed down or changed their business model as there is more cooperation among IT companies and universities.