NIIT looks to target digital skills space

Its centres will focus on high-end programmes to generate employable candidates

Educational training, skills and talent development major NIIT Limited is looking to focus on the digital skills space. By offering high-end programmes in skills that are currently in demand, the aim to generate talent that is employable, according to Rahul Patwardhan, CEO NIIT Ltd.

Patwardhan said that since there have been a lot of changes happening in the IT sector and digital transformation is a reality, which led to a new set of skills that are in demand.

"Huge vacuum needed to be addressed and though there are many computer programmes, they did not meet current skill need," he said.

The company will now offer futuristic programs like MEAN Stack, Big Data & Data Sciences Stack, Design Thinking, Cloud Stack, Internet of Things (IOT) Stack, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Robotics and Virtual Reality, Cyber-Security, under the DigiNxt Series brand umbrella. Through this move, NIIT aims to totally re-align the Skills and Career Group to the changing future-skill-sets requirement of the industry to help create job-ready talent pool for the fast evolving global economy.

In their own centres across the country, NIIT is looking to offer the high-end programmes that includes 'DigiNxt' apart from GNIIT. In their business partner centres, Patwardhan said that there would be a mix of these programmes as well as plain vanilla courses that are in demand. "The current workforce need to be retrained. Demand is much higher and we need to scale up fast enough to meet the demand, he further said.

With respect to their corporate business, NIIT has grown at an around 15% every year. Patwardhan said that they were much on track for first three quarters and that opportunity is larger than what they can service. In October 2015, NIIT launched a initiative - StackRouteTM to create multi-skilled and multi-disciplinary full-stack programmers.

For a certain period, NIIT faced some stress in the retail business. Patwardhan said that retail had been a troubled business because IT was de-growing. However, he said that this business has seen a turnaround and they have been able to bring it back to profitability. This year, he said that they will start scaling it up. , this year it will start scaling up.

NIIT also has NIIT.tv, a digital learning initiative and already has 5000 plus programmes on this platform. Patwardhan said that online learning space is seeing more students than offline and they are planning to put more commercial programmes online. In quarter two, NIIT will launching its commercial multimodal portal which is currently being built. This will be a new interface of NIIT to the marketplace. Here, the platform will automatically configure itself and offer an individual a programme based on whether you are school student, college student or working professional. They will also be given the option to do the course either online, at the physical centre or using the hybrid model.

According to MIT Centre for Digital Business, 77% of organizations consider missing digital skills as the key hurdle to their transformation strategy. Therefore, Indian & Global IT Companies are investing heavily in building digital transformation skills to enable their clients transform digitally.