It's good but it's not complete. Review on IT Education in India

Let me introduce myself before bombarding you with the IT jargons. Well I am 26 year old leading a challenging but interesting life in the shoes of an IT Analyst. I got inspired to write this review as I am already churning in this giant wheel of IT or rather you can call it outsourcing. I have worked with 2 of the 3 top Indian IT companies and 1 of the top 5 World IT companies. But trust me their working styles are so similar and yet so different. The trouble is whatever I learnt in my college time (IT Engineering); hardly 5% of it is implemented in my 5 years IT career.

Getting the IT education is not mandatory to get into IT industry. Still IT industry of India is looking for anything or everything with a word engineer. So be it a mechanical, a chemical, an aeronautical and off course IT engineer.

Let me tell you this in little more detail. The stuff which we generally study in what we call IT education is as follows:

1) JAVA/C/C++ programming: Hardly taught in non IT engineering. IT engineering courses touch upon this in little more detail. Independent study centers dive to further depths but students in these study centers are generally the ones who have not got into any engineering stream so they hardly pay any attention.

2) New Languages: ASP.Net, PHP, Servelets are the distant dreams in non IT engineering. Very few IT engineering courses visit such languages. Independent study centers have detailed courses for such languages but they cost a fortune.

3) CMM, Six Sigma Processes: Again a distant dream in both non IT and IT engineering courses. Even independent study centers do not have many courses on this.

4) Project life cycles, Different categories of IT projects like development, maintenance, testing etc. are not talked about in any thing closer to IT education.

Real world scenario:

In the current scenario of Indian IT industry the major players and major revenue is coming from the service industry. What this means is that Indian IT industry is taking work from MNCs and doing it at high quality and low price. To achieve this Indian IT industry hire the low pay talent which it gets readily from loads and loads of engineering colleges. The major work which comes to these IT industry is either maintain an already built application, test an application or in some cases develop these applications. There is limited percentage of application design work which is coming to India. Also even little percentage of Indian IT companies or rather IT companies in India do work on their independent products.

To sustain above requirements following is a must in our IT education system:

1) Application knowledge of languages. Insight into optimization, performance problems, scalability etc.

2) Options should be there to select and specialize in one or few high level languages. This should include the best practices to code in these languages. Study about the architecture of application in which these languages should be used.

3) Process training is must in the IT education of India as the whole Indian IT industry is thriving on this very fact that processes followed by Indian IT companies are much more stream lined as compared to the MNCs.

4) There should be emphasis on other streams of IT. IT is not just about development or coding. Coding is only 30% of what is done in IT industry. There should be detailed courses on Testing, Debugging, Logging, Maintenance, Application deployments, Designing etc. This is where we can readily generate specialized professionals straight through the IT colleges.

Indian IT education is still stressing on stuff which twists and turns the brain of a student to such an extent that it becomes easy for him/her to stretch it further to put completely new knowledge in it when he/she enters the IT world. Depending on improving logical and analytical ability of a student is must but it should only be practiced 30 to 40% in IT education. Rest of the IT education should stress on the real world application and functional knowledge.

Please rate the review as it will help me understand the acceptance of the same.