ICT Education and Training Services: Current Scenario and Future Prospects in India

In the current decade, there has been a tremendous growth of ICT & ITES industry worldwide and India has an impressive presence in the world trade of ICT & ITES. Indian ICT industry is a fast growing industry in terms of its annual growth in production, domestic market share, export, offshore outsourcing and investment. As a result, Indian ICT industry requires a large number of well-qualified and well-trained ICT professionals of all categories. However, a huge gap between the demand and supply of manpower currently exists. In order to narrow down such a gap, ICT education & training system needs to play a crucial role. Further, looking at the worldwide considerable growth of ICT/ITES demand, ICT training may be considered as a potential area to which India can diversify largely and where ICT can leverage to gain competitive edge over its overseas rivals. Though, India has all round favourable climate; system maturity and wide network for ICT education & training; however, such a system suffers from the deficiencies like insufficient investment by the concerned stakeholders, shortage of competent core faculty, little collaboration between academics and user-industries, infrequently up-gradation of course-curriculum, focus on mass higher education with less consideration to quality, liberal evaluation of the academic institutions for quality accreditation, lack of initiatives on the part of the Indian corporates and institutional climate dominated by the dependency motive. This paper presents current status of ICT industry as well as of ICT education & training (E & T) system incorporating the issues mentioned above. It also gives future projections regarding the same, overviews the practices pertaining to E & T in ICT, indicates towards the deficiencies in the said system & practices. Finally, the paper ends with a few suggestions that are relevant for system improvement.