Fortuitously India’s best bet — its hitherto much-maligned human resource base — is transforming into a huge opportunity for the skills development and training industry. Given that the vast gap between the inputs of Indian academia and requirements of industry is expanding continuously, skills development and executive training firms are multiplying. “Training is a long-term business, one that needs to grow more in reputation than size. That’s our objective,” says Ajay Kumar Sharma, president and CEO of the Delhi-based New Horizons India Ltd (NHI, estb. 2002), a company which has earned itself a good reputation in the national capital and its environs for its high-quality training services.
Jointly promoted by the once-famous Shri Ram Group (DCM, Shriram Pistons etc) and New Horizons Worldwide, a well-known name in executive training in the US, NHI started operations in 2002. “Now, after all these years, we’re poised to export our services to the world,” says Sharma, an alumnus of Delhi’s Hans Raj College with an MBA from Moscow Commercial University, Russia. Sharma signed up with the Shri Ram Group in 1979, moving in and out of companies such as DCM Toyota Ltd, DCM International, and DCM Benetton India prior to engineering the launch of NHI seven years ago.
Operating from 15 offices and 150 centres across the country, NHI is currently training an estimated 80,000 justice system employees ranging from data entry clerks and district magistrates to Supreme Court justices, in developing IT skills. “Government spending on e-governance infrastructure development has created a Rs.50,000 crore market for IT goods and services, of which 10 percent will be spent on training. Simultaneously institutional and corporate demand for customised training is growing. This translates into a huge business opportunity, which prompted us to tie up with front-rank IT companies such as Oracle, Red Hat and Microsoft to provide e-governance training and solutions,” says Sharma.
Currently NHI, which has 30 franchise partners and 30 authorised delivery centres, provides skills development training to its growing number of customers from 250 client sites. And recently the company has diversified, delivering applied learning, supplementary education, IIT-JEE coaching and content development services to schools.
“Development of domain skills in retail, insurance, hospitality and tourism and microfinance, among other sectors, can help realise the dreams of 80-100 million youth in this country. Therefore we have entered vocational training in a small way, training 40,000 youth in Rajasthan. Hopefully, the experience we gather in India will help us to go global in the near future,” says Sharma.
Fly high!
Autar Nehru (Delhi)