Nasscom and government’s tech skilling programme: Great leap forward

All companies are becoming software companies. You will hear that being said often. More so since the pandemic. There’s some truth in that. The more digitised a company is, the more easily will it be able to reach out to customers and partners, and more easily will its employees be able to work remotely. This applies to small ventures and big ones. It’s the way the world is going.

It also means everyone will need some digital literacy. And many will benefit from a deeper understanding of digital technologies. It is with this insight that IT industry body Nasscom, together with the ministry of electronics & IT, launched the FutureSkills Prime learning platform about seven months ago.

The platform offers a variety of courses in digital technologies in partnership with skilling and tech companies. Many skilling companies have been independently offering such courses, and those course registrations have soared over the past year. But, as Kirti Seth, co-architect & head of the FutureSkills Prime programme at Nasscom, says, trust rises markedly when the content is seen to be coming from the industry and government.

“There’s so much content out there. But what is trusted, what is relevant! That’s why this Nasscom piece is so important,” she said at the Times Techies webinar last week held with Nasscom on future-proofing India’s digital talent landscape.

Soon, there will be another big attraction to taking courses on this platform. The government will pay half the fee, and even the assessment amount, provided you finish the course and get certified. “We are in the process of putting in place the audit trails and compliances,” Seth said.

Since launch, 120,000 people have already enrolled in courses, and about 50,000 have completed them. With the government subsidy, these numbers could soar.

The programme’s objective eventually is to have a wide range of courses, from those that cater to basic digital fluency, to those that engineering students and professionals can use for upskilling and to develop complex projects in their workplaces. If implemented well, it has the potential to democratise digital skills, and make India even more attractive to global companies for their engineering and R&D work.

Paneesh Rao, chief people officer at Mindtree, said when we talk of Digital India, it is not the population represented by just IT companies that matter. Most of the latter will be skilled by the companies themselves. “We came up with the Cowin app, but many could not register to get themselves vaccinated because they did not know how to do it. We need to reach out to the broader population,” he said.

Jagdish Mitra, chief strategy officer and head of growth at Tech Mahindra, said if India can bring digital skills to play more broadly, get 11th and 12th grade students to take FutureSkills courses, it can create entrepreneurs across the country. “America has shown us that the most successful technology company startup owners are college dropouts,” he said.

Srijata Sengupta, head of HR at Accenture Technology Centres India, said everybody can be a technologist. “Technology has changed in a significant way, our mindsets can also change accordingly. Digital is about solving with the human at the centre. So, you will need software engineering skills, but you will need other skills as well. And you will start to see people cross over – a person with an arts background learning coding skills. Coding itself is changing in a big way with low-code, no-code platforms,” she said.

Increasingly, however, the onus of learning is expected to fall on the individual, even if she is part of a company. Mitra said it’s currently a shared responsibility, with companies saying it’s as much in their interest to see their employees getting skilled, as it is in the employees’ interest. “But it will move to one where companies will say it is your responsibility to stay relevant because the world is open to me,” he said.

Sengupta said learners must also find ways to immediately apply what they learn – through internships, in hackathons. Maybe through open source contributions. “Otherwise the learning does not stick, and it is not motivating enough,” she said.

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