National Occupational Standards

The Corporate and Academic worlds not being in sync is a long standing challenge. Most companies face a situation where they need workforce on cutting edge technology, but the talent coming in from academic institutes is not enabled for it. The other face of this coin asks, why would the academia invest in enabling talent for a new technology unless it is widely adapted in the industry? This is an industrial vicious circle.

NSDC (National Skill Development Corporation) of India tries to break the deadlock by specifying the performance (roles and responsibilities) an individual must achieve when carrying out a function in the workplace, together with the knowledge and understanding they need to meet a standard consistently (training curriculum). These standards, put together and validated by Industry Experts, then becomes a National Occupational Standard (NOS) which may be freely used by any corporate or academic entity as a benchmark.

I was recently part of a workgroup that defined IT Job Standards for India, conducted by Zinnov in collaboration with NASSCOM.

The results are available for public use here: https://nsdcindia.org/nos-listing/24

In particular, I helped to develop the job standards for Web and Mobile Development, together with their training curriculum. Links below:

Job Standards and Model Curriculum for Project Manager

Job Standards and Model Curriculum for Application Architect

Job Standards and Model Curriculum for Application Developer

Job Standards and Model Curriculum for UX Designer

Thanks @Priya Madhavan and @Divya Gupta for the opportunity.

Photo of our workgroup below is from a meeting that happened just before the Covid era, so please excuse the (lack of) social distancing! 😁

Industry Validation Workgroup

Actual Virtuality!

Yesterday my 10 year old son came up to me and said, "Dad can you help me prepare a slide?" He's a bit on the nerdy side but I thought maybe he wanted to prepare a presentation on a topic given by his teacher. I asked "Sure, what's the topic and who are you going to present it to?" He said "I'm not presenting it to anyone, I want to use it myself in the garden. It'll be great fun!" Then I understood he was referring to a real physical one that he and his friends could slide on!

Suddenly I realised that IT jobs have hijacked our lifestyle. The other day I found myself admiring a spider "What a nice Web Site it has built". At a restaurant I remember thinking "They need to normalize their Tables". I won't be surprised if I explain to my kid that water gets Uploaded to the Cloud through evaporation, then Downloaded as rain. I already think I live in a house with Multi-tier Architecture and Facade design pattern, and I enjoy a nice Drive in my car with a great UI of the Dashboard.

So if you're working in IT like me, take care to not Cloud your Outlook with technology, or you may find yourself greeting a friend as "WhatsApp Json?", or sending a meeting invite to your kids to come down for dinner. Just like that sometimes, disengage a bit and come into Actual Reality. Read people's Faces and Books, not Facebook or Notebooks, Write a mail to a physical Address and Post it to a letter-box not an Inbox. Be more mobile without the Mobile, don't be a fish caught up in a Net-work 😀