NIIT retail training brand boon to IT service firms

Diginxt, the new retail training brand from NIIT Ltd, will help information technology service companies hire people with skills in digital technologies. It will be launched in Chennai tomorrow.

It will offer a series of programmes such as Java Stack, Mean Stack, Big Data & Data Sciences Stack, Cloud Stack, Internet of Things Stack, Robotics and Virtual Reality under the Digital Transformation umbrella, Rahul Patwardhan, CEO, NIIT, which provides talent development service, told BusinessLine.

The programme is targeted at people with science, technology, engineering and mathematics background and having some basic computer course in their under-graduate degree. They will be trained for three to four months with a project-based methodology so that they are industry-ready from day one in new digital skills.

“We thought of doing a pilot, but the industry said we need people now and we cannot wait,” he said.

There are 3.5 million people in the IT services industry who have been working on a range of technologies especially on applications that are going through a substantial change. Companies with 1.50 lakh or 2 lakh employees have to scramble to retrain a very large percentage of their workforce on new digital technologies in the front end and back end.

The challenge of speed and volume of complete retraining is an opportunity for NIIT.

The new offering will trigger a revival of IT services for NIIT. The timing is perfect and the market is looking for this kind of ready-to-recruit people. NIIT launched this partly in China last year. “We have experience of how to operate and deliver the programme. The task is to communicate to engineering graduate students,” he said.

Apart from retraining NIIT will partner with institutions to offer the programme in the seventh and eight semesters digital curriculum.

NIIT has about 280 partners (30 own and 250 franchisees).

The Diginxt will be rolled by around 150 partners as some of them are not connected by satellite network and some are in small towns where there is not much of recruitment population for this kind of skills.

According to industry experts, digitally transformed organisations are 26 per cent more profitable than their industry competitors. Global spending on digital transformation technologies is expected to cross $2.1 billion by 2019.

By 2018, around 35 per cent of IT resources will be spent to support the creation of new digital revenue streams, and by 2020, almost 50 per cent of IT budgets will be tied to digital transformation initiatives.

All these indicate that the digital transformation is going to drive the next phase of growth in the IT industry, according to information provided by NIIT.