NIIT to train IT pros in China

Signs MoU with Chinese city, Wuxi, to create a talent pool of 200,000.

Aspiring to emerge as a major global service outsourcing hub, the Chinese city of Wuxi on Tuesday signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Indian technology education firm, NIIT, to set up information technology training centres and create a talent pool of 200,000 IT professionals by 2010. This city presently trains 10,000 IT graduates on a yearly basis.

The MoU reiterates the moves being made by China to parallelly adopt the services-led economic development model from its traditional manufacturing sector-driven economy. Located in the Jiangsu province in the heart of Yangtze river delta in Southern China, Wuxi aims to house 100 international service outsourcing and software export enterprises with an annual export volume of over $30 million.

"In the next 10 years, we want to be like what Bangalore today is in the services outsourcing sector," said Yang Weize, secretary of Wuxi Municipal CPC Committee at a seminar on 'Wuxi-Bangalore Business seminar n service outsourcing cooperation' organised in the city.

There are over 100,000 students pursuing higher education in Wuxi and a multi-level training system for service outsourcing talents is being put in place, Weize said while emphasising the role of NIIT in enhancing the students' capabilities in the targeted sector.

NIIT, which has tied up with 129 universities in China and has trained around 50,000 IT professionals in the last 10 years, will now focus extensively on its three training centres in Wuxi. NIIT's president-individual learning solutions G Raghavan said: "There is a phenomenal opportunity for services outsourcing sector in China. We will leverage Wuxi's potential to create and train 200,000 IT professionals.''

This apart, the Wuxi administration also sought investments from Indian companies engaged in offshore outsourcing business.

Claiming that Wuxi's trained outsourcing talent pool would touch 30,000 in the next two years, Weize said the salaries of Chinese employees engaged in offshore outsourcing business is 25-40 per cent lower than that of Indian counterparts.

Wuxi has also drawn up plans to put in place 20 high-level services outsourcing parks and construct an international data centre which will provide high-speed data processing and telecommunication services to over 300 services outsourcing companies.