The emphasis on Return on Investment (ROI) has never been as strong as it is in the present times. The IT industry is seeing an increased stress on checking costs and getting more with less investment. Sensing this corporate need, most Indian IT training houses are busy redefining their role from just being ‘skill deliverers’ to ‘total solution players’. While customisation and designing of training packages has always been the focus of the corporate IT training market, now additional service analysis, assessment, planning, advisory and consultative services are also being provided. With 80 percent of IT training players already involved in providing these services, many industry experts feel that these value-additions will prove to be the new profit zone in this market.According to industry observers, the most popular value-added services offered by IT training houses are designing and development of customised curriculum, pre- and post- training mentoring and support, training effectiveness analysis, reporting and tracking tools and providing advisory services on integrating new e-training solutions into an organisation’s education strategy. And, what exactly is driving the demand for these value-added services? Cost-cutting being the norm, there is an increased emphasis on recognising the outcome of learning, rather than the delivery system. “I believe that today’s circumstances have forced the corporates to look at training in a more result-oriented manner (with an increase in the monitoring requirements), where focus on building the domain expertise will help the company in the long run,” says Dr Suresh Nanda, CEO, STG. He believes that for most corporates value-added services will prove to be the key factor in terms of fulfiling their ROI goals. There is an increasing need to make employees more productive and enhance their cross function skills and technical capabilities.
More and more training houses are investing in building their R&D and focusing on market building exercises for these services. While some are busy creating awareness or assessing the training needs of their clients, many top IT training players have already gone ahead and started offering these exclusive services. Training players are now working closely with their clients, identifying business issues and also determining the appropriateness of training in addressing these issues. Take for instance the case of STG, which is planning to provide an end-to-end solution as per their training delivery. Initially targeting the call-centre industry, the company is offering services like assessment of the training needs or requirements, short-listing of candidates and providing need-based training. “I believe that by getting involved in every stage and offering a total solution, not only would we be able to help our clients in saving their individual costs (incurred through all these processes), but they will also get the suitable candidates,” explains Nanda. Agrees Rahul Thapan, director, Tata Infotech Education (TIES), who says that with the availability of such solutions (which help to cut the cost by 5-10 per cent), many IT companies are showing an inclination towards adopting the value-added servicesTIES has already come out with their ‘Training need analysis’ solution, divided mainly into two phases the pre-training metric and the post-training metric. Presently, TIES is looking at corporates who have clerical or support staff and then plan to venture into the call-centre arena to look at people who are providing help desk applications. Another player which has increased its focus on the corporate IT training market is Microsoft India, which is planning to target the industry through its core deliverables of trainers, technology, skill updation and Internet penetration. According to Pankaj Srivastava, education & certification manager, Microsoft India, “The company is increasingly emphasising on customisation and modularisation which were missing earlier in their courseware (the Microsoft Official Curriculum - MOC). There are also plans to modularise each MOC and make it e-learning compatible.”
And, what will be the driving market force? “The niche segments,” comes the unanimous answer. According to Nanda, the changing market dynamism has forced training houses to re-look at their source of maximum benefit. While each player will try to focus on the broad categories, the major differentiation would be the services offered and the tools developed, which can help a company to leverage its productivity to the fullest. STG is presently looking at the core business segments of providing banking solutions and business process outsourcing. However, according to AM Thimmaya, head, corporate training division, Aptech, though companies need to focus on value-added services to survive in today’s scenario, without an e-learning platform, it would be difficult for them to achieve the kind of quality they want.
