Reshaping Asia's Tech Talent Pool

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The growing popularity of certification programs like the Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA), which is focused on hands-on skills, demonstrates the strong need for more practical training courses that give employers confidence graduates have a the basic fundamentals in which they can build upon.

Beyond orientation
In addition external training, organizations have also been relying more on in-house development to provide the skills they find missing in new recruits. Of course every organization has its own processes, and there's always an element of one to two months of orientation before a new employee is given any major responsibilities.

This training period is also being used to provide the technical and soft skills that graduates missed in university - to fill in the gaps, essentially. A common approach is to use a prolonged internship or training period during which fresh graduates learn useful skills while the company gets to evaluate them.

For example Juniper Networks filters graduates through an internship program at the company's R&D center in Bangalore. Instead of one or two months, this program can last six months to a year.

Meanwhile, more universities around the region are starting to listen to industry. "It's important that our university training does produce graduates who are not only well trained in their own discipline, but also receive some exposure to the industry software, to the kinds of problems [companies] face," says Lim Ee Peng, a professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

Of course universities need to exercise some due diligence - "too much from a few companies only impairs, not just its own standing in the long run, but also may harm the career prospects of its students," says Sharma of Arthur D. Little. "So they need to ensure that they do not end up being perceived as 'Java school,'" for example.

Professor Lim is aware of the danger: "We are not saying that every student must use SAS. That's not our goal. Our goal is to make it possible for some students who have this interest to gain more knowledge about this software and also to benefit from it."

He recalls early conversations with representatives from SAS, which started after the company helped sponsor a university data-mining conference: "We came to this common view that we should work together to benefit both the students and the industry."

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