Recently, at the annual general meeting of the National Association of Companies for Technology Training (the apex body of a majority of computer training institutes), I was witness to some of the most frank and forthright soul-searching and introspection I have ever seen in the computer industry. Lending further credence, I suppose, to that olden-day adage about bad times bringing out the best in people.

The computer training industry, as we all know, has had to contend with a gut-wrenching slump last year, and any kind of recovery is excruciatingly still just beyond the horizon. Enrolments and revenues have been mercilessly scythed right across the board. But a ray of hope comes in the unlikely form of a new sense of purpose amongst the leaders of the training industry. As an important first step, they have moved from blaming everyone else under the sun—including the media—for their misfortune, to now, sensibly, turning the spotlight inward.

Much of the industry’s woes emanated from the manner in which the franchisee model of expansion was being executed. In the boom time, all that mattered to institutes large and small was to add on new centres with a frenzy that sometimes flung reason, quality and even common sense right out the door. At the peak of the fad, people with absolutely no idea about what running a computer training centre involved—neither from the business side nor from a technology perspective—were welcomed onto the bandwagon, their aim often being merely to gain respectability in the neighbourhood and maybe earn a few bucks in the process. And of course, once in, just to keep afloat they had to keep packing in the students, no matter what.

An anecdote related to me by one of the training industry veterans, describes the then prevailing state of affairs better than any statistics or analysis could. Visiting a town in the North, he decided to check up on the competition, located just a few blocks away from his main franchisee. Posing as the uncle, he took along one of his young employees to enquire about courses at the tiny rival institute. The counsellor there was very helpful but while talking to them her attention was constantly being drawn to someone or something behind them, in the direction of the door. This continued for a while, until he too turned around and was shocked to see that the distraction was in fact being caused by a cow trying to make its way through the door! Speaks a lot about the appalling conditions in which many of these institutes were operating, opined the veteran, but, on the lighter side, my take was that all that the counsellor saw in the cow was the possibility of another recruit for in any case what they were teaching was just a lot of bull!

Jokes apart, there were definitely a lot of fly-by-night operators who in the past often thrived by hoodwinking the student. “We have not always been entirely honest,” one of the trainers confessed. The needs of students were not being met, aptitude tests were an absolute farce and many were so steeped in their own greed that they paid no attention to the changing conditions in the technology marketplace.

Small wonder then that, barring a handful of exceptions, the training industry was blindsided by the tech slowdown. Suddenly the many inadequacies and lacunae, which were all happily ignored earlier, became a bone of contention, and disgruntled students turned away in a huff. The software folk began firing instead of hiring, and supply outstripped demand. The shoe was now on the other foot. The training industry in its existing avatar was choking.

But that’s in the past. The training industry is breathing cleaner air now. All that happened in the last 18 months or so has served as a much-needed correction. The computer training industry has played an extremely important role in this country at a time when schools, colleges and sometimes even institutions of higher learning were just not equipped to impart any kind of computer education. While basic computer education will inevitably become part of the regular school curriculum, the private training industry still has a lot to offer in several areas.

This is exactly what NACTT is trying to hone in on and facilitate now. It’s heartening to see a concerted effort to accelerate the revival and stem the number of closures— although some of the institute closures can only be viewed as good riddance. The industry is looking to augmenting its capacity to provide training for the huge requirements of the IT-enabled services sector, including call centres and such like. Remote education for advanced courses is another focus area; multimedia and animation continue to show promise; certification courses for system and network administration are popular; institutional computer usage training is gaining ground. Interestingly, the handful of hardware institutes actually registered positive growth while others were floundering—perhaps we’ve been flogging the software horse a little excessively lately.

Going a little deeper, NACTT also intends to hold workshops for franchisees to educate them in running the business and suggesting quality standards that could bring things up to a uniformly acceptable level. Identifying new opportunities for big business and initiating direct action for smaller entities seems to be its approach now.

Noble intentions all, but it’s really important that this time around they don’t remain just that. Otherwise, as all recent surveys indicate, we’re soon going to once more land up in a situation of lots of jobs to be done and not enough good people to do them. So there still is a huge opportunity for the training industry waiting to be tapped and this time it may just turn out to be bigger than the last.

- Val Souza, Editor
valsouza@expresscomputeronline.com