'... then what do they teach you in colleges?'

My US settled brother asked me the question when I was sharing my thoughts about a start-up company (founded by two of my friends in Pune, India).

Their company is creating high quality online training courses (on J2EE, C#, .Net, Software Engineering principles, Project Management etc. to begin with; slowly moving into non-IT trainings as well).

They are planning to offer these high quality multimedia-rich trainings, through their newly founded start-up, to college students, educational institutes and even software companies. My friends told me that a real good training (even on basic topics like above) is not delivered by most engineering colleges, software training institutes or even by corporate training departments. And hence their offering will find takers … this was THE value proposition of their company.

I was surprised by this … the first time I heard it … and so was my brother; when he heard it from me. So he asked me “If all this needs to be taught externally, then what do they teach you in colleges?”.

But when I looked closely at the trainings developed by this company, I realized that my friends really have created trainings that are far superior to what was available in India.

Why this? Why our colleges, traditional training institutes and even corporate training departments were not able to create as compelling training content as this one?

I really do not know the answer; but I can share few of my views:

• First of all, teaching as a profession has long lost its glamour in India: Even after 6th pay commission, teaching is still not well paid professions; industry – institution linkage is extremely weak (at best) and while education reforms have surely resulted in more engineering colleges, they have not yet achieved the desired transformation in quality and utility of education.


• Indian software companies still look at training as a cost center. With high focus on ‘billing’; training automatically takes a back-seat. (Every leading software company’s corporate strategy includes training … but it’s mainly from the hygiene factor and tick-mark for skill showcasing. Skill building is dependent on on-the-job work+trainig.)


• Software companies’ hiring process gives no weight-age to training experience. This has a direct impact on job rotation between software training institutes and software services companies.


• …

The reasons could be many … but the fact remains. Companies like the one founded by my friends are trying to bridge this important gap … which if not bridged will lead to erosion of India’s competitive advantage as offshore destination for software development.

It still remains to be seen if companies like this will be successful as business?