NASSCOM India and SAP signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to skill, reskill and upskill various industry workforces to make India a worldwide source of talents in emerging technologies by the year 2025.
In an interview with IANS, Amit Aggarwal, CEO of NASSCOM India, said:
“There has to be a big change that has to happen. We want at least 2 million people from the industry, which is half of our workforce, to be ready by 2021-2022. To think of it from India’s perspective, there are about 50 lakh (5,000,000) engineering seats, and we need to ensure that students coming out are ready to join the workforce of the future. For that, there has to be a massive change. There cannot just be the government doing things on its own.”
According to the report “Digital Empowerment Foundation-2018” report, out of India’s 1.18 billion population, 90{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} are digitally illiterate.
Meanwhile, 94{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} of households are excluded from digital literacy and IT-led growth.
The IT industry’s FutureSkills programme, which was launched in February 2018 had goals to reskill 2 million students, potential employees, and professionals within the next five years.
Sindhu Gangadharan, SAP Labs India’s Senior Vice President and MD, shared:
“There is so much work to be done to get the current workforce abreast with latest technologies. This is also part of our joint collaboration. We have identified eight future skills that we would like to focus on.”
She added:
“AI, Blockchain, data analytics, Big data, cybersecurity, Cloud computing, robotic process automation (RPA) and mobile technology space — these are 8 of the future skills that we want to help drive forward together with NASSCOM. It is not only about upskilling or reskilling. It is also about making people abreast with these technologies.”
SAP expressed support for NASSCOM India’s FutureSkills using its expertise in technology and providing select SAP experts to become mentors for the said programme.
When asked about the potential impact of the collaboration, Gangadharan answered:
“This will firmly establish SAP as a thought leader in 8 out of the ten technology domains. Impact of the collaboration will be multi-fold. We are looking at close to 2 million people being going through this process by the end of 2020, and it would go beyond that. We’ve been operating in India for the past 20 years, and close to 13,000 people at SAP are operating out of India at different locations.”
A zero-cost subscription model will be created, which is expected to benefit college students, potential workforce and current IT-enabled services industry workforce.
