NIIT launches 5-year IT course for engineering students

Mumbai: NIIT Ltd has launched ''Integrated ANIIT for Engineers'' (IAE) - a 5-semester IT curriculum for engineering students. The course, to be pursued alongside engineering studies, is a dual-qualification programme. In a country where the over 300,000 engineers passing out of colleges every year need to be retrained for IT jobs, IAE will open up a new stream to prepare IT professionals.

"The new initiative of integrating our IT curriculum into the learning offered to India''s engineering graduates, while they are still at college, will greatly improve their IT readiness. Availability of relevantly skilled IT manpower, will, in turn, fuel the growth of the industry," says Vijay K Thadani, chief executive officer of NIIT.

IT leaders, including Cognizant, Polaris, RAMCO Systems, Satyam, Sun Microsystems and TCS, have called for bridging the manpower gap in the Industry and have supported the company''s new initiative aimed at making large number of engineers readily employable by the IT industry. "The new IAE curriculum comprehensively addresses four critical areas for engineering students, to make them job-ready with curriculum support, global certification and placement assistance," C Raghavan, president of the company''s learning business, said at the launch of the new programme.

"By enhancing IT skills and employment readiness of engineering students, NIIT will not only help the IT industry by increasing the talent availability but also by reducing their in-house training requirement", he added.

The ANIIT programme covers a comprehensive learning cycle across programming and database management beginning with the fundamentals of computing and IT. The course also offers specialisation options in popular application development frameworks like Java and .NET. Additionally, the programme trains students on communication, time-management and behavioral skills, to make them ready-for-job. NIIT will launch the new program, initially in the southern cities of Chennai, Hyderabad and Bangalore. South India produces 54 per cent of the engineers in the country and also offers a huge job opportunity for these students.