Segment Analysis: Telecom Training

I t is a fact that the Indian communication services and

product industry has undergone revolutionary changes after the NTP ’99.

However, no such statement can be true of the communication training in the

country. This, despite the fact that the demand for professionals trained in

various new communications technologies has far outgrown supply in the past few

years.

While for the past many years, the IT training industry has

been proactively fulfilling the demands of the IT industry, communication

training in India remains product or technology specific. There has been little

or no effort towards a holistic approach to training in various aspects of new

communication technologies. Unlike IT, graduates from engineering colleges still

service the communication industry in India.

As such, despite tremendous scope, telecom training is yet to

acquire a business proposition.

A Disheartening Scenario

What is disheartening is the fact that even engineering

colleges are not really updated on the latest in telecommunications and



networking. Their syllabi are not tailored to meet the challenges of a fast
changing industry. The matter gets compounded by the fact that even the very few

who are in the private sector training business prefer products like WAP or

e-commerce which are in currency with the motive of making quick money. There is

little realization that a WAP or an e-commerce professional also needs to

understand the network infrastructure, on which the service is deployed, and the

application, on which it runs. On the other hand there are little efforts

towards tackling more serious but less hyped issues. For instance, in a

bandwidth starved country like India there are no courses or training modules on

bandwidth management. This despite the fact that a lot of networking or

communication-related problems in an enterprise occur because of poor bandwidth

management.

Product-Specific

At best, telecom training in India is restricted to

product-specific training like Cisco Certification or Lucent Certification. The

clamour for certified training has grown in the past few years because of the

huge demand abroad. Most of the training modules offered by the private

institutes cover just one area of communication–networking. There are very few

training



institutes which offer a complete training on telecommunication.

Notwithstanding the demand, there are not even generic

business area or segment-specific training on subjects like access and security,

VoIP, integration of voice and data networks, optical networking, and

communication software. Moreover, there has not been much effort at training

people in new technology areas like wireless networks, GSM, value-added services

like SMS and WAP, GPRS and Bluetooth. Training in these areas is all the more

important because the majority of even telecom engineering students is not aware

of these latest technologies.

Given the current scenario, the market size of the telecom and networking

related training business in India is very difficult to estimate. This is all

the more difficult because whatever efforts go outside the engineering colleges

to train people are basically individual efforts. Product-specific and

networking-related courses apart, none of the top players in the training

business are involved in the telecom training business. Unlike IT, telecom

training is yet to acquire a mass character. One of the reasons for this may be

the fact that telecom industry in India has still not shown its preference for

non-technical people unlike the IT industry which employs a mass of people who

do not have a technical background.