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Zen and the art of chiseling talents

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CIOL Bureau
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Anuradha MadhusudhananITpreneurs, is a content and instruction provider for IT best-practices training and workshops, which believes in the principle of Confucius: 'Tell me and I will forget. Show me and I may remember. Involve me and I will understand. In an interaction with Sudhakaran of CIOL, Anuradha Madhusudhanan, South Asia Region Head, ITpreneurs India, talks about the company's footprint in India, how it enables IT professionals and much more: Excerpts

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IT is a major provider of jobs for the professionals everywhere. What is the value addition that ITpreneurs India provides to the IT professionals and how does the training work?

Indeed. And ITpreneurs sits in the middle of this paradigm. As a provider of best-in-class IT competency development solutions, ITpreneurs is a key enabler of IT professionals and organizations alike.

ITpreneurs supports individuals by helping them grow their skills and competencies, and in becoming certified professionals, which in turn helps them fulfill IT workforce requirements.

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Towards IT organizations, ITpreneurs’ role is significant as it helps them grow their organizations’ competencies in the IT Best Practices and Governance domains, which in turn enables them to compete at a global level.

So in essence, we keep innovating to add value in the competency development objectives of individuals and organizations. To that end, all our products and services provide such value additions. Be they in any of the IT Best Practice Frameworks — ITIL, COBIT, ISO 20000, Prince2, ISO 27001…

Could you explain the ITIL expert program and how does it help the IT professionals in their career?

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The Expert Program is an advanced-level training in the IT Best Practice framework of ITIL v3. While the ITIL foundation course comprises concepts, processes, much like any other foundation course, the ITIL Intermediate courses are very high-end, application-oriented courses. After successful certification at the foundations level, IT professionals seeking to advance their careers in the IT services domain choose to take a set of Intermediate courses aligned to their chosen career path.

ITpreneurs’ Expert Program offering is a concentrated 10 to 12-day study camp that combines a set of Intermediate-level courses. The Expert Program makes you an ITIL Expert in about half the time it would normally take you, if you were to take the courses one by one.

That’s one advantage. The Expert Program combines a unique blend of delivery mediums that are built on scientific models of how people learn.

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So in less than half the training time, ITpreneurs guarantees superior on-the-job performance improvement. These are very high-end, application-oriented courses. They use tested and proven instructional design principles that ensure the participants not only gain the knowledge levels required, but also demonstrate significant performance improvement on the job.

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What is the product/service portfolio of ITpreneurs? What is the concept behind game-based training for professionals?

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ITpreneurs is in the business of providing high-end competency development solutions for IT. Primarily in the niche domains of IT Service Management and IT Governance. Some of these are ISO 20000, ITIL, COBIT, ISO 27001… Also supporting frameworks such as Prince2.

ITpreneurs portfolio comes straight from the horses’ mouth, if you will. This is because the people who wrote or work on the development of these frameworks have been the Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) that work on developing our courses. The courses are built as a joint effort between these SMEs and qualified instructional designers. This collaboration ensures that the training solutions in ITpreneurs’ portfolio are not only best-in-class content, but are also best-in-class learning. They are designed to ease and enable learning.

Game-based training is an approach that makes learning immersive, experiential, easy and fun. For example, our COBIT Games. It’s an intense half-day multi-player game. As participants play this game, they learn the various concepts of IT Governance as described in the COBIT framework. Games is a great way to learn tough concepts and practices.

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Who are your major clients and what is your footprint in India?

ITpreneurs works in the partner model. This makes it possible for us to work with pretty much anyone in the industry. We therefore consider we do not have competition. What does this mean? Our partners work with us not just to build competency within their own organizations, but also to provide training to their client organizations.

ITpreneurs is unique in that we do not do consultancy. Most organizations providing training do so as an addition to their core consulting business. They often find themselves in competitive scenarios with each other. However, anyone can work with us without feeling threatened, as we only come in to provide the training component in the larger consulting assignment. We have a significant footprint in India, and are steadily increasing it. We work with some of the largest training providers in India, as well as some of the largest IT and consulting companies.

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How do you look at your India business?

Essentially because of our partner-based model, ITpreneurs is able to forge relationships and build the business without too many feet on the ground. ITpreneurs sees India as a strategic geography, and our aim is to not only establish a long-term presence and brand name in India, but also look at establishing a division to provide India specific solutions.

Because of India's role in the global IT industry today, there are specific needs that IT companies and departments have in India which are different in the way they are best addressed. This is where ITpreneurs wishes to make its mark. Our commitment to India is strong — after all, we have been present in India since the start of the company almost 10 years back.

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Though India has a strong brain power, do you think we lack somewhere in nurturing the same? How does training beyond the 'routine' curriculum, as offered by you, help them fine-tune their talent?

There is a school of thought in India that indeed believes that we do not really nurture our talent. However, if you look at corporate India, at the large enterprises, there is a deep recognition of the fact that training and education have a very important role to play in personnel development, and in turn, the revenue and growth of the enterprises themselves.

When we study the school systems, we find that schools vary from one extreme to another. Indeed, there are schools that focus on rote learning, and then there are others, that emphasize thinking skills and problem solving, for example. To realize our true potential, we do indeed, need to look beyond ‘success’ in the traditional sense.

What rote learning does is to produce adults that embody the ‘tell me what to do, and how to do it and I’ll do it’ syndrome. What brings true success is a behavioral competence that focuses on ‘I see that something needs to be done here, I’ll figure out what it is and how it can be solved, and I’ll do it’. In principle, we will definitely benefit immensely from strong design thinking skills amongst our workforce.

ITpreneurs’ competency development solutions indeed, emphasize design thinking. They are centered around enabling participants to ‘arrive’ at an answer, rather than drilling them with the answers. They encourage participative learning and problem solving.

Our training products embody Confucius’ principle: “Tell me and I will forget. Show me and I may remember. Involve me and I will understand.”

Do you offer the trainings to people who are yet to begin their career, or are it only for the professionals who are already in the industry?

Beginners and early professionals start at the Foundations training level. For example, an ITIL v3 Foundation training attendance and certificate greatly enhances a candidate’s job prospects even at the entry level.

ITpreneurs’ training portfolio covers all levels of competency development needs.

Of late it has been noticed that IT professionals, though successful in their career, find it difficult to bring about work-life balance, and in the long run, this affects their personal life as well as their professional life. What, according to you, is the way out of this labyrinth and what is the role of ITpreneurs in helping them out?

Indeed, and I dare say, this is increasingly true of all professionals — IT or non-IT! There isn’t an easy answer; a tome of literature has been written on striking a work-life-balance, and I certainly do not fancy myself as an expert. That said, there are some basics that need to be addressed. For example, workload. An honest recognition that one has only those many number of hours, and work given or taken be proportionate to that is a starting point.

With that as a given, what is it that takes away from today’s professionals striking a balance? When you peel a few layers of this onion, what you find is a gap in required and available skills and competencies. This is where ITpreneurs comes in. By ensuring training is clearly focused on achieving a huge improvement in performance and on-the-job skills, ITpreneurs contributes in a fairly significant fashion, in enabling IT professionals achieve a work-life balance.

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