CHENNAI: With the government and non-IT firms turning out to be the major clients in the corporate IT training market, training centers seem to be sitting pretty. And with the commencement of computerization process in government bodies, PSUs and banks, the IT industry is now hoping that their training segment would be marginally affected by the US downslide.

However, the same cannot be said of the high-end training institutes that have been catering to software companies. Many have begun to feel the impact and are now expecting their revenues from corporate IT training segment's to fall by at least two-three per cent.

For software firms, IT training centers have been traditionally providing induction training, specific training on emerging technologies and skill enhancement of their professionals. However, the US slowdown has put a brake on mass recruitment of professionals, forcing software companies to cut down costs. When software companies resorted to cutting costs by training one or two professionals who in turn trained others in their company, training centers began to face the crunch. To add to the woes, in-house training divisions set up by the software companies started encroaching into their market share.

"Mostly training centers offer generic training programs that are unsuitable to the corporate environment. The courseware content materials, case studies, evaluation style, etc. are varied and aren't suited to the corporate context. Hence, it calls for extensive deliberation to build a training program at IT centers. Moreover, their programs are modular in nature as opposed to holistic engineering approach based on the actual training need. And these institutions have limitations in continuously scaling up to the corporate training needs," said Cognizant Academy chairman Dr P N Sridharan.

Polaris Software Lab, which will shortly be setting up Nalanda - a centralized umbrella for Polaris' educational initiatives, cites lack of hands-on-training on live projects as another major handicap of IT training institutes.

High-end training institutes such as TransEd Software Education, that provides corporate training exclusively for software companies, feels software firms should leave the responsibility of training their professionals to specialized institutes. "Training is not their core competency area, neither can they focus on research and development and come up with specialized courseware like us or provide training on emerging technologies," said TransEd assistant vice president A Namburaj.

But some software companies tend to think it is necessary to have the best of both worlds - a judicious mix of internal training to upgrade one's core competency areas and external training to keep abreast of new technologies. DSQ Software for instance, maintains this stand despite its Professional Development Group, which concentrates on overall development of an individual by focusing on four major skills such as technology skills, people skills, business skills and language skills.

Though presently hit by the slowdown, IT training centers such as TransEd are waiting for March 2002 to bring good tidings to the Corporate IT training segment as the markets are expected to be revived with the flow of US capital investment next year.

Meanwhile, education majors such as NIIT and SSI have began to cater to non-IT training firms and government sector to ensure that the revenue earnings from that segment remain more or less insulated from the US slowdown. Some industry players feel that training companies that are able to quickly overlay the customer's needs and possibly their existing content on a well researched and structured template for training will benefit more than organizations that try and hawk their basket of pre-existing training products.

SSI feels that customized training solutions would be the next big wave in the corporate training segment where any type of training need is applied on a training template and offered on variety of choices, through books, CD-ROMs, Internet or on the company's Intranet. And it is not only eyeing the Indian market, but also the US market, which IDC recently identified as a ‘multi- billion-dollar market.’ It feels that in these hard times, companies would prefer flexible training modules than formal training programs, to cut costs.

With IT training centers reaching out to the government, public sector units, and non-IT companies along with IT companies and even international clients, corporate IT training segment seems to be on the path of growth.