Smaller cities could be breeding ground for IT talent: Karnik

New Delhi, May 1 (UNI) NASSCOM President Kiran Karnik today stressed the need for standardising the growing IT (Information Technology) workforce and suggested measures for identifying the wooping gap of half a million personnel required by the industry.

''The communication skills of young people seeking entry into the IT industry would need to be improved to have a much larger base from which the industry can choose'' The National Association for Software and Services Company (NASSCOM) Chief said unveiling India's first ever 'National Index of Communication Skills' prepared by MeritTrack, a skills assessment company in the IT sector.

Mr Karnik said expanding the network for assessment tests would enable the industry to reach out to smaller cities.

Mr Karnik highlighted the fact that the rapid development of the industry was constrained by availability of trained skilled manpower and felt that creating benchmarks for assessment tests would go a long way in filling this gap.

''There is a great requirement of skills assessment and development of testing methods for the development of the IT sector.

MeritTrack has been working in the field for the last six years and I am really happy about the work they are doing in this field,'' he said.

MeritTrack is one of the significant companies in skills assessment having assessed over 9,00,000 candidates for over 110 customers. They claim that their scientifically designed assessments are used by their corporate customers for measuring skills for employability in various sectors. With a validated suite of over 150 tests spanning communications skills, general abilities, domain knowledge and personality profiling, these tests are delivered online using OnTrack and offline across several cities in India.

The National Index on Communications Skills is a scale of measurement that compares the communicatiuon skills of applicants across the four regions for employability in the BPO and in the Services Sector. Compiled from a sample size of over 11,000 candidates, it is the second after the report on Engineering Talent Pool in India.

To be published periodically using new data points, the Index is aimed at tracking and presenting the dynamics of the talent pool quality and availability and will aid corporates in their talent acquisition strategy by helping them recognise the availability of talent across locations and in identifying regions with specific skills in communication, said a MeritTrack release.

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