Tech Mahindra CEO C. P. Gurnani is looking to provide skills to manpower regarding new-age technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, cyber-security and machine learning. He believes that being updated with the technologies is the biggest challenge for Indian IT players.

Gurnani spoke about IT graduates in a recent interview and his words are eye-opening for the freshers. He said:

“A student scoring 60% marks cannot pursue BA-English today, but can definitely go in for engineering. My point is simple — are we not creating people for unemployment? … The Indian IT industry wants skills. For example, Nasscom says 6 million people are required in cybersecurity by 2022. But we have a skills shortage. The point is if I am looking for a robotics person and instead I get a mainframe person, then it creates a skill gap. This comes as a big challenge.”

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He shared how Tech Mahindra has created a tech & learning course where freshers are provided knowledge regarding industry trends. He told about some other top companies that have also created similar facilities to make skilled employees. This wastes a lot of time of companies to shape freshers into professionals and still the top IT companies hire only 6% of the engineering graduates. The question is what happens to the remaining 94 percent? What do they proceed in their career?

Hiring surely impacted due to the lack of industry knowledge in students and this is due to the fact that most of the engineering colleges don’t have staff who have staff with real-life experience of how work is done in industries. One reason is that the equation is now no longer linear. The number of engineers in the country is increasing too fast as compared to the growth of IT companies which is the reason why demand is always less than the number of graduates and this gap is increasing every year.

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Tech Mahindra’s net profit has successfully doubled to Rs 1,222 crore in past 1-year which shows that companies are growing but working class is not enjoying the success due to lack of skills.