Several Indian corporates are (desperately) scouting for a rare breed of freshers: the 'job-ready' graduates. And recession or no recession, these companies are faced with a strange dilemma. On one hand, there exist job vacancies which must be filled up, and fast! On the other hand, you have candidates who are desperately looking for jobs, but several interviews later, they are still looking. A large percentage of them may possess a BE degree or even a postgraduate degree such as the MCA or MBA, from a Tier 2 or 3 institute. Yet, they are deemed as 'educated but unemployable'. Gautam Bushan, Senior Vice President - Learning & Development, WNS Global Services, echoed this sentiment at a recent seminar dedicated to India's recruitment challenge. He shared that for every 80 people actually hired by one of India's largest BPO, at least 800 candidates needed to be interviewed! According to Bushan, the hiring capacity of WNS is approximately 796 per month. Thus you can imagine what a mammoth time-consuming challenge it is for HR personnel to recruit candidates who can get the job done, let alone excel at it.

Just degrees, no skills

So who are these lucky but elusive 'job-ready' graduates who do manage to get hired? Besides having an educational qualification, their secret weapon is the requisite skills sets, which enable them to be productive on the job, right from Day 1.

Corporates across sectors such as service, IT, ITES, BSFI, hospitality and retail, to name a few, broadly look for two types of skills.

One, soft skills, which include effective communication (written and verbal), critical thinking, savvy professional networking abilities, corporate awareness, sales and customer service, the ability to think on your feet, and a polished appearance. Two, domain knowledge and skills, such as software development, ERP and finance, to quote a few examples. The specific combination of skills you will need, also depends on your sector and the job profile of choice.

Outcome-based learning

If you are wondering why a degree alone may not work, Dr K R V 'Raja' Subramanian, CEO of Radix Learning, a finishing school with a focus on IT, paints a bleak picture about the state of education in India. He used strong words such as 'mangled' and 'uninspiring' with conviction, to describe the outdated teaching methodologies and curriculum at several universities across the country. "We need outcome-based learning," stresses the former professor of Computer Science and dean - Distance Learning, at BITS. Outcome-based learning translates into 'job-ready' students.

National-level skill crisis

The employability problem isn't restricted to any particular geography; it's a national-level skill crisis affecting both freshers and working professionals (looking for better jobs), across cities, towns and rural India. The skill impairment spans a whole gamut of areas such as poor English language skills, a lack of self-confidence and functional knowledge.

Sometimes a candidate may have the domain knowledge and skills. But Jill Coates, head of Corporate Training at British Council, observed that sometimes even if a candidate has the relevant domain skills he may be intimidated by savvy interviewers due to poor communication skills, which could in turn take a toll on confidence levels. That is the bad news.

A focused approach

But there is some good news too (to be taken with a pinch of salt). This lacuna in the Indian education system has resulted in the creation of a different breed of institutes the finishing schools, which focus on making students more 'employable'. Typically, the curriculum is structured so as to train you for a specific job profile in a specific sector (though it may vary across schools).

The duration of programmes can range between three days to one year. Several finishing schools have mushroomed across the country. Let's explore what you need to keep in mind when choosing a finishing school.

NEW DELHI: Actor Ranbir Kapoor - reel-name Harpreet Bedi - fleeces his ex-employer by offering free 24x7 technology support to new PC buyers from his start-up Rocket Sales Corp in a recent Bollywood flick.

Down to real life, 24x7 support for tech products bought by small businesses and home offices has remained largely unfulfilled. Which has left a gap in the $1-billion technology support market, being filled by start-ups now.

eTechies, founded by 3 execs who worked with Raman Roy at Quattro BPO - and now backed by former Microsoft India MD Rajan Anandan - aims to move into this slot.

"There are no organised technology service providers focusing on end-to-end needs of SMBs in India," says Anandan. "Small and medium businesses do not have trained manpower and th US have to depend on local operators. This is where eTechies.in steps in."

Small technology firms are moving into the support space because large companies like HCL Infosytems , TCS and Wipro Infotech carry out maintenance, procurement and support of IT infrastructure, but only for large companies: usually for orders over Rs 10 crore. Often application development and maintenance contracts are bundled with support with deal sizes topping Rs 50 crore.

What's interesting is that the market potential is significant. About 10 million personal comps are expected to be sold in fiscal 2010-11, MAIT estimates say. Given that the annual maintenance contract for a PC is Rs 4,500, the total market size comes up to Rs 4,500 crore (roughly a dollar billion).

Operating out of Gurgaon, eTechies runs its service cabs across the national capital region. The company's CTO, Samarth Goyal, doubles as a shared CTO for clients helping in procurement decisions, networking support and devising IT strategies for small businesses.

When ET called the firm's helpline number, COO Siddharth Bhatia took the call. He doubles as a customer sales representative, along with 50 other employees. "The response has been overwhelming," says CEO Rohit Chaudhary. "We have 500 customers in just two months." The founders pooled in Rs 30 lakh from savings to start the firm while Mr Anandan has invested an undisclosed amount.

iYogi, which offers remote desktop troubleshooting for US customers through its 5,000 call centre agents out of India, plans to open a service centre for India customers in 2011. "Remote support is going to become big in India. Only 2-5% of troubleshooting requires onsite support," says iYogi's CEO Uday Challu. iYogi has fixed two million computers in the last five years and raised $30 million from Sequoia Capital.

LogMeIn Rescue, a solution from Nasdaq-listed LogMeIn, is aimed at the support and helpdesk technicians and provides a single solution for secure remote support of PCs, Macs and smartphones , without pre-installing client software. It has roughly 20 customers in India.

While Dell, HP and Lenovo offer free support for a year, none of the vendors offer 24x7 onsite support. And there are no one-stop shops for fixing mobile phones to printers to laptops to tablet PCs.

"We operate during office hours and a complaint is looked into in the next business day. For very remote places, the response time may be the next business day," said a Dell India spokeswoman.

For small businesses, Dell has launched a service which can track a stolen Dell laptop and delete all data, as soon as it is connected to internet. It also covers physical damage to laptops, under its paid warranty. Typically, a small business unit spends about half its IT budget on Pcs and laptops with about 15% on networking and up to 2% on peripherals like printers.

eTechies faces competition from open market resellers, who offer services as cheap as Rs 350 a visit, or Rs 2,500 per PC for yearly maintenance, apart from component charges. Inclusive of parts charges, resellers ask for Rs 4,500.

But it is cheaper than the extended (2-3 years) warranty cost of Rs 6,500 for a Sony Vaio laptop. And it is only a warranty and does not offer full trouble-shooting.

Google is talking with educational-software companies to help build a marketplace for online learning programs, an industry whose value may approach $5 billion this year.

Games and instructional tools for teachers from companies such as Grockit and Aviary are already offered in the Google Apps Marketplace, an online store that opened in March. Google, the world's largest search engine, seeks to lure more educational developers and is stepping up efforts to generate revenue from the project, executives say.

Software sales for US schools and colleges this year should surpass the 2009 total of $4.6 billion, according to Parthenon Group. That could provide a new growth stream for Google, which gets most of its sales from search advertising.

The company works with schools, providing free word processing, e-mail and spreadsheet programs to students and teachers. Now it wants to help outside developers sell applications to educators.

"If we can provide access to education apps to our 10 million users in thousands of schools, then that would be a win all around," said Obadiah Greenberg, Google's business development manager for education.

Most software makers with products on Google Apps Marketplace now collect all revenue from sales generated through the site. In the coming months, Mountain View, California-based Google plans to begin taking a 20% share of sales, Greenberg said.

'Google Guru'

Programs in the Apps Marketplace can be operated inside the private Web domains many schools have set up with Google, said James Birchfield, instructional technology specialist at Harwich Public Schools in Massachusetts.

"A teacher logs into a Google Apps account and they can access anything in the marketplace," said Birchfield, who is known by colleagues as the "Google guru." "It gives you a one-stop-shop kind of thing where we know we can integrate it and we know where it's all saved."

Aviary Education, one of the first education apps offered on the site, is a free Web-based tool that lets students edit images and audio recordings in a private environment that can be monitored by a teacher.

It's often used by teachers who want students to record class presentations and share them online, said Michael Galpert, co-founder of New York-based Aviary.

"The more that they promote Google services in the classroom, the larger the audience we get," Galpert said. The company now gets most of its new customers through Google's Marketplace, he said.

Middle-School Project

Using Aviary's software, seventh graders at Harwich Middle School created presentations on women's issues in the Middle East, pairing images with narrations and sound effects. Google made the software easier to find and easier to protect students' work, said Birchfield.

"That was a big deal for us." In its first nine months, most customers of the Google Apps Marketplace have been technology administrators at small and medium-sized businesses, who use it to find tools such as collaboration software made by Box.net and Atlassian.

Google's Greenberg wants to get school leaders to rely on the marketplace to sign up and buy Web-based learning software. He also says students with experience using free Google apps in school may be more likely to become paying users when they join the workforce.

Brand Image

Analysts estimate Google will report sales of $21.7 billion this year, based on the average of projections compiled by Bloomberg.

More than a potential new source of revenue, the company's push into education could help it build its brand recognition among the next generation of Internet users, said Sandeep Aggarwal, an analyst at Caris & Co. in San Francisco.

Providing "more apps for the education vertical helps them to basically acquire a customer for their whole portfolio of products early on," Aggarwal said. Apple and Microsoft have offered discounted prices to schools for 25 years in efforts to "own a new computer user" from the