IBM joins hands with TSSC to spur emerging technology skills within India’s telecom sector

Technology major IBM has joined hands with the Telecom Sector Skill Council (TSSC) to upskill students and young professionals in the telecom industry to prepare them for new emerging technologies like big data, cloud, Internet of Things (IoT), mobile application development, data science and business analytics.

IBM and TSSC will offer paid courses, designed by technology experts from IBM and domain specialists from TSSC. These one-week long courses will offer access to relevant IBM software and platforms, including IBM Cloud, IBM Watson IoT platform, Big Data Solutions as well as mobile application development tools.

Upon the successful completion of the program, students and young professionals will be certified by IBM Career Education and TSSC.

According to IBM’s estimates, India’s working population is expected to expand to 750 million to about a billion people. And, only 40% of the Indian industry executives have the required skills, while the skill gap is 60%.

“The partnership with TSSC is an attempt to bridge the capability gap in the marketplace. It is impossible for a company like to do us individually. For the scale, we are doing this with TSSC. This is the initiative to take those capabilities on scale in the India’s telecom market,” Karan Bajwa, Regional General Manager, IBM India / South Asia, told ET in an interaction.

Bajwa said that the telecom industry is going through a disruption with telecom companies going beyond the traditional business models and are identifying new offerings for which new skill sets are required.

Lt. Gen. (Retired) and CEO of Telecom Sector Skill Council SP Kochhar said that telcos are getting into new diverse areas like retail and banking, besides transitioning from a hardware intensive infrastructure environment to software defined infrastructure.

“We also see a departure of traditional roles to data-centric roles, given that huge data is getting generated. This data must be utlised properly,” he added.

According to TSSC, the telecom industry will require 12 million new direct and indirect jobs over a period of time in India. TSSC is currently in talks with telecom service providers, along with ecosystem companies for these skilling courses. “There is a lot of interest coming in from tier 2 colleges. We intend to take these courses to rural area because that is the untapped market,” Kochhar said.

Bajwa said that one of the main agendas of Digital India program is building ability to upgrade the skills of people, while will accelerate any technology initiative that will be rolled out.

“Traditionally, the industry is being bifurcated between blue collar and white collar jobs. And, we at IBM believe that the traditional definitions are no longer valid. There’s a new-collar job community emerging that embraces new technologies like cloud, Artificial intelligence and cognitive way more rapidly than the traditional ones. These capabilities are the ones that are really representative of the transforming environment of our country,” he said.