The Training Imperative

India's top two IT training companies have gone global, training thousands,
in dozens of countries from China and Russia to Mexico and South Africa.

This is a great going. It reflects the strength of brand India in technology
and services. 'If India can so effectively deliver and scale up services, which
are based on manpower, it must be good at training.' And yes, Aptech and NIIT
have done a good job of building up their brands across these countries.

Yet, the tech training industry in India is relatively small, at the Rs 1,500
crore level. Not tiny, but nowhere near the potential that an industrial boom
should generate. Especially in the services industries, ever so
people-dependant.

Training is an area with immense untapped opportunity, if only because 99% of
companies aren't really yet 'consuming' it.

A few exceptions are in our familiar services industries-tech and BPO. These
industries cannot survive without training: they largely recruit freshers, and
train them in very specific domains. That's the induction process. Few companies
have ongoing 'refresher' training, except where they can't do without them (such
as reskilling when a project takes up a new development platform).

Yes, companies do have a few 'training days' scheduled in the year, but few
do it as a continuous, ongoing process of quality enhancement.

Most line managers want ready-made people. Business exigencies might force
them to recruit freshers, but their preferred HR spec is: 'Past experience'.

For most line managers, 'HR' and training are not priority. They're nowhere
on their list of things to do among daily 'ops', sales, reviews, meetings,
everyday fires to fight. Training is 'downtime'. It pulls people out of their
crucial line functions and disrupts day-to-day work. And training is the
responsibility of the HR department.

Now here's a different perspective for a line manager: if she can focus on
training her team members well, they can deliver better, and there will be fewer
fires to fight.

It never ceases to amaze me how willing managers are to re-do a team-member's
work, or get him to redo it, or tick him off soundly-usually in the annual
appraisal-but how few take the training approach to correcting the problem
(other than saying 'training suggested' in the appraisal reviews).

A few companies have figured this out, and have gone beyond the
our-only-asset-is-people' lip service. They're continuously retraining, while
planning for this 'downtime'; documenting process and knowledge to capture
learnings; and using metrics to measure impact.

Training is an opportunity for businesses, especially in the services
industries, to improve quality, efficiency and output with the lowest long-term
input cost. And it is of course a great opportunity for the training companies.