IT has been the largest generator of employment in the organised sector in India over the past five years with about 3,50,000 jobs getting added every year.

The changing needs of this industry can be attributed to: the maturity of the IT services sector, the emergence of IT product companies in India, the dramatic rise of smartphones and tablets and the huge apps ecosystem that is driving these ‘post PC devices’, cloud computing entering the mainstream, and the dramatic rise of ‘big data’ and ‘analytics’.

Naturally, colleges, particularly the premier institutions, are looking at ways and means of responding to such changing needs.

A word of caution is in order. Any curriculum has foundational elements that address the long-term needs of an individual who goes through 4-6 years of college education that is expected to provide the basis for a professional career spread over more than 40 years. The curriculum must be relevant so that the graduates can find themselves meaningful employment in the industry (barring a small number who take up academic, government or military jobs).

Foundation and relevance are like cake and icing: both are important, but the proportion should not be forgotten. Countries such as India have a history of fly-by-night operators mushrooming everywhere, promising ‘relevance’ (often at the cost of quality); and, bureaucratic universities with curricula that ignore the aspect of relevance. Luckily, premier institutions always had the right balance, though sometimes industry fails to take notice of it.

Many changes

Every aspect of computers has changed in the last five years. Microprocessors are becoming increasingly multi-core, with application specific cores (graphics, computing, networking) optimised to perform specific functions. Developers must be able to leverage this.

From the days of ‘memory crunch’ we have moved to ‘memory abundant’ days; the entry of ‘flash’ memory has blurred the separation between primary and secondary memory.

In turn, specialised applications like ‘data look up’ can benefit from ‘main memory’ computing, as opposed to retrieving data from any number of high-speed disk spindles.

Databases are no longer limited to ‘structured’ data (where OLTP or online transaction processing systems excelled), but are moving to ‘No SQL (structured query language) data’ of enormous size, often called ‘big data’ problem.

With internet penetration increasing and wireless technologies like 3G, LTE and SDN becoming a reality, there is an abundance of bandwidth too.

With big data available instantaneously through high-speed internet, ‘real time’ analytics is becoming a reality, at least in some segments such as telecom, retail and banking.

Naturally, then, the education of tomorrow’s IT professional has to factor in these changing developments.

Addressing the need

How do institutions of higher education address these changing demands? Definitely not by encouraging fly-by-night ‘training’ outfits but by:

carefully revisiting the foundation courses (architecture, programming, compilers, operating system, databases and networking);

integrating ‘cloud’, big data, analytics, apps development, post PC devices; and

starting new elective courses that go into the details of analytics, cloud and big data.

In a sense, the foundation can be tweaked so that students see a continuum of ideas that have evolved.

For example, cloud computing can be seen as a natural extension of distributed computing, location-independent hardware and software resources, computer elasticity, ‘eventual consistency’ that is sufficient for many big data problems as opposed to ‘every time consistency’ needed by OLTP (banking, online trading, insurance). In the process, the curriculum will get richer, more relevant and interesting.

With so many online resources and free environments available, along with the advice of ‘open source’ volunteers, learning can be far more fun and rewarding.

Companies such as HP and Infosys have domain experts who have developed courses in some emergent areas; institutions can benefit from them. The maturity of cloud infrastructure permits the creation of “laboratories on the cloud” to test emerging ideas.

If these strategies are followed, many of the challenges of changing needs can be addressed.

(The author is Director, IIIT-Bangalore. The views are personal.)

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