Employees With 3-15 Year Experience Are The Main Target For Re-skilling

Arun Rajamani, Country GM, Pluralsight India talks to BW Businessworld about e-learning, education system and AI shaping up the system. Edited Excerpts:  

To stay relevant in the internet age, there is an increased focus on continuous re-skilling. What are your views on this?

Re-skilling is the need of the hour for the Tech industry in India. IT companies realise that they need to mine the gold that exists within their workforce to be able to deal with the combination of new business models and new technology that is transforming the global marketplace today. While the industry is taking a generational leap in training freshers in new gen technologies along with foundational technologies, the employee segment in the 3-15 year experience bracket is the main target for re-skilling. So, re-skilling is pretty much across the board, from India’s largest IT services and product companies, to mid-sized and start-up companies.

NASSCOM predicts that between now and 2025, Digital-led IT services will grow 4x while traditional IT services will grow 2x of current revenues. So, broadly speaking Digital as a skill category represents what we call as New Tech and is the most sought-after re-skilling category.

How e-learning is getting its sheen back?

In India, e-learning is a very broad and deep market. Whether you are looking for a job or are presently working, online learning provides the best way to learn quickly, on-the-go, allowing for personalization of learning, online assessments and tailoring of learning paths to align with your career path. It’s also important to implement what is being learnt. Leveraging data and analytics from online learning platforms, enterprises can invest in segmenting their employee base based on their current skill levels through online assessments and tailor the learning content towards what they need to learn for re-skilling with dedicated learning paths.

Pluralsight is focused on self-paced learning for enterprises and technology professionals. This segment in terms of people is about 2.75 million, and is set to grow to 5.2 million tech professionals in 2018 per reports, thereby overtaking the US to be the largest developer population in the world.

How govt. push for digital learning will further accentuate the growth of e-learning in India? 

The Indian education system has been slow to change and is over-reliant on the classroom method of teaching. A technology company takes 6 months to train a college graduate to becoming a billable professional due to the skills gap that exists between what is taught in academia and what the industry needs. We are now seeing technology companies vertically integrating with colleges to ensure that they train students early and create a strong supply chain for themselves. We are now seeing universities adopting online learning to augment what is taught in the classroom, with more practical industry knowledge. Pluralsight’s recently announced partnership with Google aims to educate more than 100,000+ tech professionals on Mobile, Web, Cloud and Data technologies through Google scholarships .

What are the new developments taking place in the industry?

The Indian IT industry is almost 40 years old. When industries transcend decades, they need to face and overcome generational shifts in technology and business models. What we are seeing now is a combination of rapid technology evolution towards digital and new-tech and business model evolution towards driving more non-linear revenue growth. The need for re-skilling the Indian technology workforce stems from this combination. Today we are seeing 3 focus areas when it comes to re-skilling

1. Emerging tech skills – contribute less than 5% of revenues for tech companies but are evolving tech ecosystems

2. Digital & Full Stack Dev skills – contribute less than 25% of revenues for tech companies. A number of employees with base skill sets are being cross-skilled to enable them to work on digital projects. Companies are also working on creating a full stack development workforce with cross-skilling

3. Run the business skills– contribute 70% of current revenues for tech companies and constitute current and legacy skills that require investments run the business

4. The above 3 skill categories are a continuum; what is emerging today will become current tomorrow

How AI is been used in the system?

Indian businesses are looking to AI and machine learning algorithms in a bid to smooth processes and make well-informed decisions. The scope of AI is massive. Today AI is already being used to personalise web experiences for users. AI can also be used in credit analysis and risk estimation in financial services. Automotive sector can use AI to predict component failure based on usage patterns. Today’s enterprise software systems are moving towards the self-healing mode so that engineers can focus on building solution architectures than on applying patches. In healthcare, AI is being tested to see if treatment outcomes can be predicted. In short AI has a lot of use cases in India and with re-skilling, India can become the AI-technology stack builder for the world.

Rajguru Tandon

BW Reporters The author is a correspondent with BW Businessworld with keen interest in HR and employee welfare.