Finishing school to ready people for BT industry

After setting up a finishing school for IT, there is a move for setting up a finishing school for industry-ready personnel for the biotechnology units in Karnataka.

Jeetendra Singh, officer on special duty of the Department of IT, BT and S&T, Government of Karnataka, told reporters in Mysore the IT Finishing School, the first such effort in the country to meet the manpower requirements in the IT companies, was a success. The Centre had sought details on the school for starting such schools in other states.

He was launching the 'IT Talent Hunt 2008', a first of its kind event organised by the Raman International Institute of Information Technology (RiiiT), in association with the department, at the Vidya Vikas Institute of Engineering and Technology, on Wednesday.

The talent pool will be organised across Karnataka by assessing students' skills needed to enter IT companies. A pre-assessment test will be conducted in engineering and science colleges. After evaluations, the names of the students will be uploaded on the department's server, which can be accessed by IT firms, instead of going to colleges and conduct campus interviews, RiiiT CEO S V Venkatesh said.

RiiiT has succeeded in placing students even from non-engineering courses in IT sector and was playing a singnifcant role in providing information on pre-requisites needed to enter the IT sector. The talent hunt was aimed at finding 10,000 IT eligibles, he said.

Singh said, the IT industry continued to face manpower shortage. Of the 40,000 engineering students who possed out of colleges, only 25 per cent were employable. In order to improve the employability, the finishing school was launched and it was doing good with the percentage of the employable going up to 60-65 per cent. Building up a talent pool was the next move to make available employable graduates to the IT firms directly.

Highlighting the achievements of the IT sector in Karnataka over the last years, he said the number of IT firms had risen to 1,900 plus from 60 companies, majority of them housed in Bangalore. It provided direct employment for 550,000 people and indirect jobs to about 1.2 million. Karnataka's share of exports was one-third of the country's total exports.

Eight Tier II cities were projected for IT industries and they were Mysore, Hubli, Dharward, Mangalore, Belgaum, Gulbarga, Hassan and Shimoga. In order support new efforts, the venture capital fund had been increased to Rs 50 crore from Rs 15 crore, Jeetendra added.