Considering the number of people who are interviewed in a day you will not see more then 7-8 of them actually getting hired. Certain basic deficiency in terms of communication skills as well as the overall business service orientation, like how to handle and service a customer, timeliness, responsiveness can be a hindrance and these are the areas that need critical address. We feel that relevant short term training can really open the doors to making a lot of such people being eligible.

Q: How many students are enrolled with NIIT Uniqua and which regions in India see maximum enrollment?

Ans: Over the past year that we have been active, we have ha about 10,000 people making enquiries about the courses we offer. We have had about 2,000 enrollments in our program and we have found that both north and east of India are seeing better response than say south India.

Apart from the tier 1 cities we have identified about 40 tier 2-3 cities from the future taskforce perspective. We are offering our training programs in tier 2 cities like Vishakhapatnam, Bhubaneswar, Madurai and we are also planning to expand into other tier 2 towns as we grow and the demand for employment and training increases. According to our estimates in about 10 years from now over 40% of the BPO work will be done in tier 2-3 towns compared to almost 98% of the work being done in tier 1 and metro cities today.

Q: What programs and courses are high in demand from BPO companies?

Ans: You need to look at the BPO sector as a pyramid which taken in 1 to 1.25 lakh people every year and it also is a profession which has the potential to see tremendous individual growth within a pan of 5-7 years. So you have situations where people as young as 26-27 are supervisors to a team of 300-400 people.

In such a situation training programs can be divided into three sections. One is specific knowledge of the vertical they are functioning in like BFSI, IT services etc. the second category has basically to do with soft skills, people management, team building, leadership and other such skills. Thirdly there is a lot of quality oriented programs including six sigma that are high in demand.

Q: What are your plans for NIIT Uniqua going forward?

Ans: Given where we are, I see us offering our training programs from over 200 location in the next 2-3 years. About 90 tier 2 towns will become important vehicles which has a large number of students who are looking for appropriate training programs to join the BPO industry.