Capgemini Engineering partners with 33 Indian institutes to upskill future talent

French multinational IT services and consulting company, Capgemini’s engineering and R&D services announced on Thursday that it has partnered with 33 institutes across multiple states in India. Without naming any of these institutes, the company said that the objective of these academia partnerships is to create a ready pool of skilled talent and meet the industry demands. 

The company said in a press release that till 2022, it has signed over 57 memorandum of understanding (MoU)s with different entities to enable a model of lab-based MoU which has been deployed across the country for a variety of skills in the areas of product lifecycle management (PLM), engineering automation, model based system engineering (MBSE), Industry 4.0, 5G, embedded software, VLSI (Very Large-Scale Integration), networking, and more.  

The lab based MoUs model also enabled the company in selecting an institute by evaluating its autonomous status, intake student quality, management focus and infrastructure.    

The lab runs effectively by assigning mentors from Capgemini, training the faculty and providing industry best practices, conducting hackathon, offering internships to the students, conducting guest lectures and ensuring continuous improvement, the company said.  

The partnership, according to Capgemini, will see an increase in student placement, faculty development, enablement of research and innovation opportunities as well as expansion of academic streams to newer disciplines for students to learn technology and skills aligned to their career choices. 

In the coming years, Capgemini said that it plans to make its academia collaboration more robust and scalable so that a sustainable ecosystem is created and effectively leveraged across diverse portfolios. Toward that end, the company in collaboration with the institutes is upgrading the curriculum by focusing more on real life projects and application of emerging and relevant technologies to upskill students. 

According to a report published in February 2023 by staffing firm Teamlease, India will need 30 million digitally skilled professionals by 2026 and that at least 50% of the current workforce should upskill or reskill themselves in digital technologies, including, artificial intelligence (AI), big data analytics, internet of things (IoT) and cloud computing to bridge the digital skills gap.