Making students job-ready is their job

NEW DELHI, INDIA: Mohandas Menon, vice president- Education at QAI, in an interation with CIOL's Muntazir Abbas speaks on workforce development and company's focus areas.

What are the areas of consulting and workforce development that QAI is focusing on currently?

QAI focuses on enhancing and improving operational excellence in industries across domains. Our consultancy services focus directly on areas ranging from the capability models of the SEI of Carnegie Mellon University, through project management, quality assurance, software testing, innovation, etc. Besides training, our offerings cover skills assessment and globally recognized professional certifications that testify to the skills and knowledge  acquired by our clients. Our training offerings have traditionally been oriented towards the corporate workforce with 1-15 years experience.

What are your focus areas in education sector?

In the education space, we are training students of engineering and management at colleges,  typically the so-called Tier 2 and Tier 3 colleges in B and C Class cities. The focus is on supplementing purely academic knowledge with professional technical skills, aligned to globally recognized professional certifications to enable students to bridge the gap between their academic knowledge and the skill sets required by corporates, thus making them more readily employable.

How does QAI contribute to process management within IT/ITes sector? What are the areas that you'll be focusing on during 2012-13?

We do have collaborations with other organizations, both technical and non-technical, including IT companies such as IBM. Also, QAI is helping build competencies at an individual, organizational and national level through partnerships with universities and industry bodies.

We have also trained / certified employees at companies like TCS (5000), Infosys (4000) and Accenture (2000). we have signed an agreement with Singapore Computer Society (SCS) to promote quality assurance certifications and quality best practices amongst IT professionals in Singapore. We are also in partnership with companies like Everonn to increase the employability quotient in the IT, BPO and service sectors to reach out to over 2,000 Everonn powered colleges and 20,000 students

What are QAI’s solutions for BPO performance improvement? How does it have an advantage over other solutions/competitors?

ITES — BPOs and service centers across the world typically face challenges in hiring, training, staffing, transition management and transaction monitoring (QA).

QAI has tied up with HDI and TCCS to provide courses like HDI certified Support Analyst, Support Centre Manager Support Centre Director, and TCCS certified TMC, Customer Service Professional, Operations Manager which provide process and performance improvement services to ITES—BPOs and service centers. The advantage that we have over other competitors is that our training is conducted by the same consultants who provide cutting edge solutions to global clients.

Give an insight into e-learning

From 2000-2008, the industry grew 10-fold globally. The Indian market has been slow in adapting to e-learning and the expected annual growth rate on the Indian e-learning market is 20-25%. Corporates and individuals are waking up to this methodology over conventional corporate training as it saves a lot of cost and adds to time efficiency.

With 100 million Internet users and government-driven push to broadband, the ministry of HRD is focusing on e-content for engineering students. Do you foresee that e-content will play a key role in education sector?

Today the world has changed and so has the Gen Y. The perceptions are formed before the actual buying decision is taken. Everyone wants to be ahead of each another. E-learning, thereby has got its true relevance in today’s world. Students have started thinking about jobs before they actually know what corporates demand from them. Someone said that if you don’t dream, how are you going to achieve them? So, we have students dreaming, and organizations like QAI help them realize their dreams.

What is QAI’s future roadmap? What are the revenue targets for 2013?

QAI is primarily targeting the key area of providing functional and platform independent technical training to students in order to make them job ready and to increase their level of performance, once employed.

We have also entered an alliance with IBM to take a new programme to the academic world— the QAI-IBM joint certification programme in software testing, a 300-hour, job-oriented programme which marries our software testing methodology with IBM’s technology. It is currently in its first phase, where about 50 engineering colleges across India have shown interest to start this programme.