Posts Tagged ‘employability’
More Endeavours to Improve Employability
Every day, more and more institutions are waking up to the fact that students passing out from their portals are not equipped enough to contribute to the industry. What they are lacking is employability skills. The institutions are worried because a dip in campus placements reflects poorly on their capabilities. They know that the best way to attract students is to show them a long list of successfully placed candidates. In order to ensure the development of soft skills, they are tying up with companies, training institutes and universities like IGNOU. Among the soft skills, effective communication is given the most importance as most students are weak in this area. Click here to read a report about it.
Wipro BPO to Train Potential Employees
Sometime back I had written about hiring activities in Wipro BPO. From the looks of things, the recruitment drive is still on and Wipro is getting up close and personal with the process. Faced with the fact that graduates coming out of the various colleges typically lack employability skills and the colleges do little to improve the situation, Wipro signed a MoU with the Acharya Nagarjuna University (ANU) to take the responsibility of training emerging graduates. Under the scheme, students who are passing out of regular degree colleges and who possess decent communication skills, will be trained by Wipro and subsequently absorbed.
Apart from requirements for its BPO, Wipro also needs people for various other positions such as technical support executives, human resources, accounting, supply chain and others. In order to make the most of the MoU, officials from Wipro will visit different colleges and identify students who would be suitable for these positions. The identification will be followed by a training programme where the potential employees will be trained to handle the various responsibilities and will be made to experience what working in Wipro is all about.
The company has announced two recruitment drives already for the PB Siddhartha College of Arts & Science. One in September and the second in November.
Industry and Academia Link Up.
Besides providing training and organizing coaching centres,companies are tying up with colleges and institutions to make sure that essential employability skills are cultivated during the college years. This makes sure that students get a clear idea of the job profile and learn the differences between academic curriculum and actual responsibilities once they become a part of the industry. An attempt is made to seal the gaps between theory and practice so that the transition between academics and work becomes that much smoother. I can see more such partnerships coming as companies will look at it as an effective way of reducing recruitment and training costs as well.
An example of this linkage is the recent alliance between Krishna University and Efftronics Systems. An M.Sc course in electronics and instrumentation will be offered jointly by the university and the company. Lecturers from the university will be taking classes in the company premises and students will get the advantage of a hands-on experience.
Refer to the article in The Hindu for more on this.
Be Employable, Be Secure
For those of you who are worried about the future of IT in the wake of the recession, there is nothing to worry as IT is here to stay and is actually still in its initial stages. It has a long way to go and a lot of growth to see. So said Mr. P. Rajendran, Director and Chief Operating Officer of NIIT. From his experience of being associated with NASSCOM, Mr. Rajendran opined that while growth rate has slowed down and is currently going ahead at 16-17% from the erstwhile 27%, it is by no means an alarming situation. He emphasized on the prospect of public-private partnerships which can give rise to exciting possibilities. According to him, and rightly so, enhancing employability will automatically lead to a feeling of enhanced security. If you have trained yourself properly and have made yourself desirable in the job-market, then security is not something you should be terribly worried about.
Read the detailed report in The Hindu here.
Fast and Accurate:The Keywords of Typing
In this post, I would like to focus on a skill which i feel is somewhat neglected by trainers and trainees alike. When you talk of job training or improving employability, the first few things that come to your mind are communication, organization, writing etc. However, several positions in the industry require you to possess efficient and fast typing skills in addition to the obvious ones. It will definitely add to your credentials if you work on your typing speed and accuracy.
Practicing typing is largely similar to practicing writing, with the difference being you can choose not to be imaginative and just copy text from a book or article. While typing, keep a watch handy so that you can calculate how many words you are typing in a minute. Most companies which are keen on your typing speed would want to know your WPM (Words Per Minute) count. As you go along, pay attention to accuracy as well. It won’t do to have your fingers flying all over the keyboard at lightning speed only to create content which is full of typos. Try to stay away from the “delete” and “backspace” buttons as much as possible and hit each key only once to form words.
Start slow and with practice, you will surely pick up pace.
Faculty Training-A Step in the Right Direction
In an earlier post I had discussed that the general unfamiliarity of teachers with technical vocabulary is a major problem ailing our technical institutions. A lot of the course material is lost on the English teachers who largely hail from a non-technical backgrounds and they struggle to explain things to their students. Now it is heartening to see that something is being done about this issue.
The Indo-US collaboration for Engineering Education (IUCEE) conducted a training/orientation programme for teachers in the field of technical education. Around 600 teachers participated in a session with acclaimed US professors to familiarize themselves with existing and emerging technology as well as to improve their teaching skills. These teachers will in turn speak to the staff of IUCEE regional centres all over the country enabling a large number to grasp various technicalities and become better equipped to handle technical courses.
Needless to say this will go a long way to improve the employability of teachers aspiring for a position in technical training and students who will be taught by them. I think these workshops should not only be conducted for teachers but for the students also. It will give them a chance to acquaint themselves better with technology and prepare some who want to get into academics.
Check out the report in The Hindu here.
Learning English:Exposure Emphasized
One of the most important things you need to remember as a BPO employee is that the people you will be calling might be very different from you and me. They are based in different countries and belong to various cultures. The way they speak and use languages are different as well. Different countries bring in certain unique words and expressions to the English language which are derived from their cultures and their native languages. While training a BPO employee, companies usually spend a lot of time familiarizing him/her with these unique expressions since failure to comprehend these might lead to a breakdown in communication.
If you are aspiring for a BPO job and looking to enhance your employability, you will do well to look at some of these unique words and phrases and make a habit of using them while speaking. I am pretty sure an expression like “It’s a lemon” will perplex most of us in India but in the US, this phrase is commonly used to describe something that is defective. Thus a good knowledge of these expressions will surely help you get ahead of competition if you are looking forward to a rewarding BPO career.