Large companies in sunrise sectors such as IT/ITeS and retail have shown the way in investing in training and academic interventions to feed their huge manpower requirement. Now, much smaller and niche players are not hesitating to replicate the model as industry-ready talent is getting scarce. Minnows are investing in creating third-party training facilities to feed their own requirements and also convert their idle assets (machines and manpower) into a revenue stream.

Behind this trend is not just an economy growing at 8-9 % a year, but also the structural shifts that demand new sets of skills the current education system is not geared to meet. It is this skill void that is compelling even rank start-ups to put on the coach’s hat, industry observers say. The start-up world is full of such examples such as The Writers’ Block, Teleradiology Solutions, Comat and TutorVista. And these could just be tip of the iceberg.

Rajesh Shukla, the founder of The Writers Block, a Bangalore-based documentation outsourcing company, prefers to call the choice of a technical writer’s job a “happy accident”. This is because not many are aware of the field and those who do are not adequately trained. So, this start-up today has a parallel training school that has so far trained over 500 technical writers who have joined the likes of Infosys and Wipro apart from TWB itself. There would be a need for 50,000 technical writers in the country over the next five years, he says.
A similar story is at play at Teleradiology Solutions, which reads MRI and CT scans of patients in the US at 30% lower cost. The Bangalore-based company, which dishes out medical reports in half an hour to manpower-strapped hospitals in the US and Singapore, is training radiologists and doctors in the art of reading these images. Again, the driver is captive need, which has been spun off into a revenue stream.

Says founder Dr Sunita Maheshwari: “There are only 10,000 radiologists in India while the number in the US is 25,000 for a population of 250 million.” The company’s recently launched training school, Rad Gurukul, is targeted at medical personnel and healthcare technologists.