For employees looking to join a BPO organization in India, NASSCOM has initiated an employability benchmark that would provide the industry with a set of scores for an individual and help determine her merits.

Called NAC-Test (NASSCOM Assessment of Competence, the test would do away with the requirement having to sit for individual tests from BPO companies. Instead, this common NAC test would make it simpler and its one-year validity means there would be no need for fresh tests during that period.

The NAC test is part of a multi-pronged effort by NASSCOM to generate and sustain a reservoir of industry-ready and industry-relevant workforce to meet the employee demands of the ITeS-BPO sector that is growing exponentially in the country. The long-term goal of NASSCOM is to convert India’s ‘trainable workforce’ into an ‘employable workforce.’

A joint study by NASSCOM and McKinsey estimates that by 2010-2012 the IT and ITeS industries will need about 2.3 million hands and that by 2012 the ITES firms alone will need to employ 2.7 million people.

In 2008, the ITeS-BPO industry, according to NASSCOM estimates, would require 5 lakh fresh employees.

NASSCOM would like its NAC test to be, for the large part, the filter that companies use to reliably recruit such large numbers in the coming years.

Based on a Skill Gap Analysis it carried out, NASSCOM identified certain core areas where skills need to be benchmarked on a pan-industry basis. These areas are speaking, listening, analytical and quantitative reasoning and writing.

The seeds of the test were sown by NASSCOM in consultation with more than 30 ITeS-BPO firms in the country. NASSCOM identified seven testing themes: listening and keyboard skills, verbal ability, spoken English, comprehension and writing ability, office software skills, numerical and analytical skills and concentration and accuracy.

The NAC test will have seven sections. Of these, the first two will be ‘autonomous’ in nature and will be delivered by computer. The speaking test will last for 25 minutes and will consist of six ‘prompts’ calling for a one-minute response.

The prompts will provide general topics to respond to, information that the candidate has to summarise and ‘tasks’ such as responding to a voice mail. The spoken responses will be scored ‘holistically’ on the basis of their effectiveness in communicating what was intended. The grading will take into account factors including accent, hesitation, choice of words and grammatical mistakesThe section on listening will also last for 25 minutes. Here, the ability of a candidate to comprehend recorded “spoken stimuli” such as short dialogues will be tested

There will be 30 multiple-choice questions in this section. While the questions will be delivered by computer, the responses will be on answer sheets.

The section that tests analytical and quantitative reasoning provides a candidate systematically presented information – such as a set of rules – from which he will have to draw valid inferences.

The mathematical content of this section includes arithmetic and algebra and the questions will be so designed as to test a candidate’s ability to reason on the basis of basic mathematical concepts. This section, and the next two, will be delivered on paper and will last for half an hour and will consist of 30 questions.

The extent of mastery of standard written English is what will be gauged in the first section on writing skills. This will last for 20 minutes and will have 30 questions. The last section will be about writing essays. This 20 minute session will ask candidates to write a couple of essays on topics of general nature