Monday, December 31, 2001		Article

Corporate training to suit organisational needs
Pramod Khera

IT training is an industry that is prevalent across the globe. The industry has grown because of the high obsolescence factor of trained manpower and ever-growing requirements of trained manpower as IT invades all operations of corporations worldwide. In fact, the greatest demand in the developed parts of the globe is from the corporates for IT training. There are large corporate training organisations in the USA and the European markets that serve this need of corporates.

In India, IT training industry grew because of the demand for training for fresh under-graduates and graduates so that they could enter into IT mainstream. This demand arose because of the inadequate supply of trained IT manpower from the formal education sector and also because of inadequacy of the system to cope with the rapid developments in the industry. Corporate training has remained in the background as most training organisations offer it as supplementary to career training. Corporates in India have been slow in implementing IT in their organisations, thereby not feeling the need for trained manpower.

This underwent a sea change during the past couple of years, especially with the entry of MNCs in the country. There arose the need for training of the hired employees. This has also put pressure on Indian companies to go in for computerisation so that they are able to effectively compete with the multinationals. The Internet revolution has further fuelled the need for trained manpower as most companies are seriously exploring possibilities of Web-enabling their operations and are adopting e-commerce.

However, there is a dearth of quality corporate training organisations in the country. In fact, there is no organised training entity that is focussed specifically for offering training solutions to the corporates.

Informal market research indicates that corporate training market worth Rs 120 to 200 crore lies untapped and it is estimated that this market is growing at over 50 per cent annually. Most of the offerings in the market are from the unorganised sector and freelancers.

In order to address the corporate training market better, segmentation of the market is important.

For any corporate training organisation, it becomes necessary to offer targeted products for the different segments. The contents of the training programs, the trainer profile and the methodology of training differ for all segments. For the user companies, it is especially important that the trainers are familiar with the industry in which the corporation is operating so that relevant case studies and examples can be woven into the training.

The training needs of an organisation have to be analysed by the corporate training organisation so that a proper solution could be evolved. This has to be done at the time of finalising the training proposal for the organisation. It calls for a detailed interaction by the prospective trainer with the concerned users and following a proper training needs analysis methodology to arrive at the training requirements. The approach here is similar to offering a consultancy solution. In fact, corporate training can be viewed as an extension or a part of IT consulting. The user organisations look at corporate training as a means of enhancing the returns from their investments in IT. A consultancy approach is the only approach, which will enable the corporate training organisation to deliver these objectives to the client.