No Let Up in Demand

The survey covered 116 organisations belonging to both the LME and SME

segments across different metros. Despite the challenging times that the economy

(and especially the IT industry) is facing, IT skills turned out to be a must

for most organizations, specially at the time of recruitment. While IT companies

and enterprises both recruited training institute passouts, it was found that

they were taken for their programming, database and network management skills. A

major portion of passouts were placed in the maintenance, networking and

software development functions. The entry point of these passouts was obviously

lower than BEs and MCAs.

And finally, about tomorrow: IT skills are essential, be it in the enterprise

or industry. While IT skills are a pre-requisite for all industry jobs, in the

enterprise it is for 74% of the jobs. Besides the IS department, IT is used in

other functions like support, finance, marketing and HR.

Degree courses: Still commanding value



Both industry and enterprise recruit training institute pass-outs. While 58%

of IT firms polled do recruit passouts as compared to 54% of enterprise

respondents, the number of those recruited from such institutes is less than 20%

of all IT recruits across industry and enterprise. Clearly, a BE/MCA degree has

greater value. The slowdown of 2001 seems to have put dampened recruit plans

over the next few months.

IT training budgets: Enterprises lag behind



IT companies expectedly allocate significantly greater amount of budgets for

IT training as compared to their enterprise counterparts. 54% of IT companies

polled said their IT training budgets accounted for more than 20% of their total

training budget as compared to 10% among enterprises.

Hot Skills: Programming, database & network management



Programming skills are the most sought after across both industry and

enterprise. This might be due to the relatively low, entry level profile that

the pass-outs enter, usually as programmers. Database management skills and

network skills follow in succession. Among enterprises however, network

management skills precede programming skills indicating perhaps that many

pass-outs are taken in a hardware/network support function.

Corporates: In-house programs preferred



The IT industry opts for in-house corporate training, and NIIT, Aptech, STG,

SSI and SQL Star emerged as the most preferred vendors. Specialized vendors like

SAP and Oracle also figured among the ten most preferred vendors for corporate

training.

Hardware maintenance tops IS job lis



Within the IS function, its hardware maintenance and network management that

most passouts find jobs in. This is more in case of enterprises. In the

industry, pass-outs also fit into software development and software application

maintenance functions. More specialised functions such as ERP, CRM and SCM seem

to remain the prerogative of degree-holders.

Methodology

To assess the recruitment requirements of organizations, Dataquest conducted a survey in the first week of April 2002. This sampled 116 companies across different metros, of which 68 were from the enterprise segment and 48 from the IT industry. The respondents revenues ranged from less than 50 Crore Rs to more than Rs.10, 000 crore. Enterprise respondents spanned different verticals such as manufacturing, services, pharmaceuticals and energy. This included Pepsi, Apollo Tyres, National Stock Exchange, Cipla and GE Capital. IT firms polled included HCL Infosystems, Wipro, IBM, HP and Polaris Software. The survey aimed at understanding the value that the Indian industry attaches to passouts from IT training institutes.

It also aimed at determining the most preferred training institutes both in terms of qualifications of prospective employees and their corporate training programs. Based on the feedback received, Dataquest analyzed the difference in perception between the enterprise and industry segments. While a number of interesting new findings emerged, there were also some findings that

were similar to Dataquest’s previous survey on IT training in May 2001.