BENGALURU: The Karnataka Government has created many centres of excellence which need to be leveraged, said Kris Gopalakrishnan, Chairman, Vision Group on Information Technology, while urging the industry players to work with one or two of them.
He also suggested that the professionals become adjunct professors in colleges outside Bengaluru and expose students to the role of a leader by spending a few hours over the weekends. They can even adopt a college, or perhaps a town, to develop a sector, he noted. “It’s in our interest to invest in colleges nearby. When we talk about the supply side, it’s our responsibility to build this, Kris noted during an interaction with members of the IT industry.
Quoting the Zoho story as an example, he said that Class 10-pass students in Tirunelveli were trained as software engineers who are as productive as anyone else in the field. “There are experiments in Inda which we should take advantage of,” he suggested.
Talking about revamping polytechnic institutes, Higher Education and IT/BT Minister Dr C N Ashwath Narayan said the government is planning structural reforms with boards of governors. He encouraged the industry to adopt and run these institutes to make quality education equitable while assuring that the government will continue to provide funds to the institutes.
When the government sought to know about lacunae in skills, Ramkumar Narayan, VP-Technology and Managing Director of VMWare India, said deep tech is the biggest opportunity and it trickles down to the entire infrastructure. “The challenge is that every company is becoming a tech company and it is no longer just the tech companies that are hiring.
All are looking for skills in cloud, deep tech, AI, ML, and there’s where the supply shortage is,” he said. Hari Vasudev, Country Head & SVP- Technology at Walmart Global Tech India said innovation will come from holistic approach across engineering, data sciences, design, business and analytics.