8 lakh Indian engineers trained in emerging technologies: Nasscom

National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom), the software services industry lobby, said today that it had already trained 800,000 Indian engineers in emerging technologies like cloud, big data, artificial intelligence (AI), internet of things (IoT) and blockchain under its FutureSkills initiative in a year as the demand for talent base grows, driven by digital transformation.

Nasscom also said that India’s IT-ITeS talent base has been growing at 20% year-on-year, and the country now houses 260,000 cloud computing professionals along with 185,000 professionals each for big data, analytics, social media, and mobile platforms. It added that the country also has over 170,000 IoT-trained professionals.

“As digital technologies disrupt our industries, capacity building, and skill development emerge as core components working towards bridging the current skill gap,” Debjani Ghosh, president of Nasscom, said. “With reskilling and automation emerging as the future drivers of the industry, we aim to craft a new wave of growth and innovation through a digitally skilled pool of professionals.” 

Nasscom said demand for digital talent is expected to increase at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 35% between 2019 and 2023, requiring at least 27 lakh skilled professionals.

As part of the FutureSkills initiative, Nasscom has identified 10 emerging technologies, 10 professional skills spanning over 70 job roles and over 155 technical skills.

Some of these skills include problem-solving, design thinking, continuous learning, communication & story-telling, negotiating & influencing, collaboration, project management, product management, program management, and digitalisation. 

Ghosh also said that more than 300,000 employees were committed to the platform which has seen a rise of 1.5 times over the last year.

FutureSkills also includes over 100 universities and firms that have nominated their talent to be reskilled using the platform. Content for the platform, which is being curated by industry experts and academia, is being developed by 30 partners.

Nasscom has planned to start a new programme called Digital@Scale under which it will include 100 universities to train at least four million digitally skilled professionals by 2025.