Nasscom scouts for youth in North-East

In a bid to make the ‘employable workforce’ that is industry-ready and maintain India’s edge in offshoring, IT body Nasscom has rolled out its Nasscom Assessment Competency (NAC) programme in the north-east. This programme intends to supply ‘ready talent’ to BPOs and ITES companies.

This programme has already been rolled out in other parts of India and Nasscom has now rolled it out in the north-east to tap into the talent pool available in the northeeast region.

This will enable us to further the goal of identifying talent from the Indian hinterland and providing them with job opportunities in the BPO industry, which is seeing growth rates of 40 per cent every year. “The students in the northeast region have good written and verbal communications skills which makes the region very attractive for recruitment for the BPO industry,” Nasscom president Kiran Karnik told HT.

NAC was launched as an industry standard assessment and certification programmes to see to it that workforce is to ready to be employes instead of training them, which will ensure a continuous talent supply to the BPO sector.

The target audience is the final-year students who will be getting into the job market in the future. The intent behind assessing these students is to identify the level of talent which is available in various parts of India, especially in tier-2 and tier-3 cities, added Karnik.

At present, the IT and ITES sector employs 878,000 and in 2005, a Nasscom-McKinsey report said that the Indian BPO sector will face a shortage of 350,000 professionals by 2010. Since then, industry observers have been saying that this shortage of talent is a cause of concern. “If steps are not being taken to meet the demand-supply gap, India will no longer have cost advantages (due to rising labour costs) and other countries would gain from it,” says Pankaj Vaish, head of Accenture’s India BPO operations.

The NAC pilot testing phase was officially launched in August 2005 and was completed by testing approximately 6,000 candidates across various ITES-BPO companies. Post the pilot, NAC was rolled out in Rajasthan in 2006 where 2500 people took the NAC test.