Is information technology education industry-relevant and gender-inclusive? Perspectives from Andhra Pradesh,India

Abstract

Industry reports show that fresh engineering and non-engineering graduates from Indian universities are not readily employable. The Government-owned Andhra Pradesh Information Technology Academy (APITA) seeks to equip graduates from the state’s degree and engineering colleges with industry-relevant skill sets for gainful employment. This study describes the activities of APITA and empirically examines two questions: (1) Do students from colleges affiliated to APITA command higher salaries as compared to students from colleges not affiliated to APITA? (2) Do women graduates receive starting salaries that are lower than those of their male counterparts? Using data from placements conducted by APITA for the state’s students in the year 2017–18, the study finds that the job market signals the higher quality of APITA-trained students by offering them higher salaries than are offered to students from colleges that are not APITA affiliates. The study also shows that there is a wage premium attributable to the female gender insofar as entry level salary levels are concerned. The study highlights the constraints faced by APITA, and its future role in addressing the deficiencies, along with managerial implications.

Keywords

Andhra Pradesh education gender government information technology

The newly created Indian state of Andhra Pradesh (AP), after the geographical bifurcation of the former state into Telangana state and the residual AP in June 2014, is spearheading information technology (IT)-driven e-Government through fruitful collaborations with the private sector in the IT and the IT-enabled services (ITES) space. Several e-Government initiatives of AP, which include e-public services delivery, an “Aadhar”-enabled food grains public distribution system, and e-Pragati (the state-wide enterprise resource planning architecture) are being emulated by the other Indian states. AP is implementing these e-Government projects with significant private-sector participation, thus enabling the adoption of best practices from the private sector into the rubric of public administration (Sundar and Venkataramanaiah, 2019). The strong IT-driven economic growth has enthused private-sector players, both big and small, in the IT and the ITES sector to operate within AP.

Andhra Pradesh (AP) contributes a quarter of the nation’s workforce in the IT sector, and so has fostered an IT education system through education centers affiliated to public universities, private universities and the Rajiv Gandhi University of Knowledge Technologies. While Vijayawada and Tirupati towns host 15 IT education centers each, an additional 80 centers are located across the other towns in AP (Gundemeda, 2014).

Evidence from literature, however, highlights the inadequacy of university curricula with reference to IT education (defined, for the purposes of this study, as a degree or a diploma education in computer science, information technology, and related disciplines like electronics, telecommunication and bioinformatics) and concludes that only about 15 percent of engineering graduates are employable in the IT industry. The remaining graduates, the findings point out, lack basic communication skills in English, numerical ability and logical reasoning (Gundemeda, 2014; Upadhyay and Vasavi, 2008).

The EDUCAUSE Center for Analysis and Research (2014) has reported that, although students from developing economies have taken massive open online courses (MOOCs) in IT, they regard traditional college degrees as the gold standard, and the use of technology for academic engagement with students is evolving.

Students often engage with digital devices (like smart phones, and laptops) to access information and content outside the classroom. However, substantial evidence shows that students tend to pay less attention to academic inputs, and miss out on instructors’ teaching content in the classroom, when they use digital devices in the classroom for non-class activities like texting, social networking and emailing (Beland and Murphy, 2015; Dahlstrom and Bichsel, 2014; EDUCAUSE Center for Analysis and Research, 2014; Kusnekoff et al., 2015; McCoy, 2013, 2016). Further, college graduates are adept at using social media and other Web 2.0 technologies for non-professional purposes, and to stay connected. The assumption that these students automatically know how to use social media and Web 2.0 technologies properly for acquiring knowledge and content from professional sources is a myth (Switzer and Switzer, 2013). Driving the point further is the study by Mueller and Oppenheimer (2013), which observes that taking notes on laptop instead of using pen and paper in an instructor-led classroom lecture results in impaired learning for the students. Learners using laptops for note-taking flounder on conceptual questions and critical reasoning, as they tend to mindlessly copy lectures and do not process information. These studies emanate from the first world, but are equally applicable in developing economies like India, given the fact that digital literacy and associated technologies have not penetrated as much in the rural hinterland, as compared to the first world.

The message is thus clear. As pointed out, students and their parents rely more on traditional college degrees awarded by public and private universities in India for acquiring knowledge, signaling social status and securing a job. The scenario is not much different in AP, and the inadequacies of freshly minted graduates from the universities, as pointed out by the literature mentioned earlier, remain more or less true. To bridge this gap between fresh university graduates and the IT industry’s requirements, and to improve the skill sets of fresh graduates and diploma holders in IT and allied disciplines, the Government of AP constituted the Andhra Pradesh Information Technology Academy (APITA) as a society in 2004 (see section 2 for further details).

Yet another dimension of the problem is the ability of the IT education system to enable adequate and meaningful employment to women in the IT sector. With reference to women’s participation in the IT industry’s labor force, estimates range between 15 to 35 percent. While male enrollment in IT education continues to be higher than female enrollment, Gundemeda (2014) notes that the proportion of women pursuing IT education in AP is twice as high (at 36 percent) as compared to enrollment in other streams of technical education, and that 35 percent of IT professionals in the industry are women.

Upadhyay and Vasavi (2008) estimate that the proportion of women IT professionals in India is much lower, at 15 to 20 percent, which is a cause for concern. More serious is this study’s observation that this proportion pertains to lower-level jobs in the IT sector (trainees, software engineers, and project leads), while there are fewer women professionals in the middle and the higher levels of management (general manager, vice-president and above).

Thus, the evidence in the literature points to an inadequate IT education system in India, including AP state, which is unable to satisfy the demands of the industry. With reference to AP, what are the contributions of APITA in improving the skill sets of degree-level students and making them industry-ready? Is there a gender premium in entry-level salaries of IT professionals in AP? If men earn significantly more than women at the entry level, that regressive trend may further alienate women from assuming higher roles and responsibilities as they progress in their careers, which may adversely affect their labor participation rates in the IT sector. What strategy should APITA craft in such a scenario?

To the best of the author’s knowledge, no studies exist which estimate the impact of gender on IT industry placements in AP. Nor are there studies that critically review the IT curriculum in the state’s universities with reference to industry relevance. This study seeks to provide some answers to these questions in e-Government policy making, and herein lies its contribution.

The rest of the paper proceeds as follows. In the next section, the mission of APITA, its organizational structure, academic activities and placement initiatives are described. In the subsequent section, the hypotheses are developed and the empirical model is explained. The following two sections then, respectively, describe the data employed in this empirical study and present the results. Finally, conclusions are offered, together with some managerial implications.

APITA

The programs and modules offered by APITA are academic add-ons to the students’ mandatory university curriculum. Students choose a few modules and programs from APITA’s wide bouquet, which suit their academic interest and career aspirations. APITA procures the licensed training modules in bulk (often at discounted prices) from proprietary IT and ITES firms, and offers these expensive and prestigious programs to the interested students at subsidized prices. Students undergoing these courses are equipped with relevant skill sets, and may stand a better chance of finding appropriate placements in the IT and ITES industry.

Organizational structure

APITA is set up as a not-for-profit society, registered under the AP State Registrar of Societies, and governed by organization-specific rules and regulations, and headed by a Chief Executive Officer. Thirteen district development managers (DDMs), stationed in as many districts in AP state, provide support at the district level and coordinate with the educational institutions in the urban, semi-urban and rural areas.

The annual registration fees for engineering colleges is rupees 20,000 for initial membership, and rupees 10,000 for a renewal of annual membership. For non-engineering colleges, APITA charges rupees 8,000 for initial membership, and rupees 4,000 for a renewal of annual membership, while membership and renewal are free for publicly funded educational institutions. At the time of writing, 241 colleges have registered with APITA, of which 16 are publicly funded. In essence, privately funded educational institutions discern value in associating with APITA, while the response is lukewarm from publicly funded institutions, given the fact that there are 110 publicly funded educational institutions in AP.

The government provides about rupees 50 million (1 USD = approximately rupees 69) annually, as a grant for implementing the various programs, and administrative expenditure. The yearly expenditure of APITA averages about rupees 49 million.

Academic programs

APITA engages with the academic arms of major firms in the IT and ITES space, and helps conduct training programs and workshops (for both students and faculty of educational institutions) through faculty hired from the industry. On-campus training of students by deputing hired trainers to the colleges is the major strategy of APITA. It recruits faculty from the IT industry based on the demand for the courses, and the courses are taught on-site, across the state. The classroom and laboratory infrastructure of the registered college is used for training the students and faculty. As mentioned, the faculty recruited by APITA from the IT industry visit the colleges, and impart training in industry-relevant content to students and faculty of the host college. The industry partner usually provides access to its software free of charge during training, but in a few cases the colleges procure the required software and hardware.

The colleges and students, mainly from Tier II and Tier III towns, register online with APITA (see www.apita.ap.gov.in for details). At the time of writing, 8,553 students have registered with APITA, and derive benefits from its training and placement drives.

Table 1 provides details of training imparted by APITA to students and faculty for the academic year 2018–19.

Table 1.

Details of training imparted by Andhra Pradesh Information Technology Academy (APITA) in academic year 2018–19.

Training program topic	Number of students trained	Number of faculty trained
Oracle Database	584
Animation	880
Autocad	481
Autocad (Advanced)	99
Soft Skills	8913
Cyber Security	3906
Arm Embedded	157
Industrial Internet of Things Project simulation	326
National Instruments LabView	1875
Unity 3D Gaming Hackathon	281
Aptitude and Reasoning	711
VM Ware	4930
Indian School of Business—Technology entrepreneurship	146
Cyber Shiksha (Data Security Council of India and Microsoft)	40
Database Design and Programming with SQL		52
Engineering Education and Research		126
AP&J, VMWare IT Academy		19
Java		65
Internet of Things		40
Total	23,329	302

Source: Office records of the Chief Executive Officer, Andhra Pradesh Information Technology Academy, Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh, India.

Placement initiatives

In association with industrial and academia partners, APITA also conducts mega job fairs, individual job drives, virtual drives, start-up drives and hackathon-based hiring drives for students in degree and engineering streams under the initiative LEAP (Look for Employees in Andhra Pradesh), launched in May 2017. The goal of the LEAP program is to facilitate placements for students who graduated between 2014 and 2018, especially for those from the rural and semi-urban regions in the state, and irrespective of their institute’s (as well as the individual student’s) registration with APITA. Through LEAP, APITA repositioned all its earlier placement endeavors under one umbrella brand.

Leveraging information technology (IT) and social media

A hallmark of LEAP is its extensive use of IT products and services to reach out to stakeholders (the student community, college faculty, industry and government officials), and bring them together on a common platform for facilitating training and placements to the graduate students in the engineering and non-engineering streams. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn were used to reach out to students and recruiters. Attractive announcements were designed using Adobe Photoshop for the sides of buses which were deployed in the countryside to spread the message of LEAP. Figure 1 shows how these IT products were employed to drive LEAP.

Figure 1.

An announcement designed using Adobe Photoshop on buses in the countryside to popularize placement drives in Andhra Pradesh.

Challenges

Challenges to job creation in the IT and ITES sectors multiplied in the divided state of AP since its bifurcation in June 2014. With the loss of Hyderabad, a major IT hub, to Telangana state, AP was hard-pressed to accommodate the burgeoning degree graduates in meaningful job roles. A major proportion of the graduating students depended on job placement networks in Hyderabad, Bangalore and Chennai. LEAP was conceived to alleviate this dependence and facilitate placements for the graduates within AP. Managing social media accounts and balancing the digital presence for a traditional organization required careful budget management.

Impact

The impact of social media expansion and its synthesis with LEAP in the academic year 2017–18 was significant. Prior to that year, APITA had restricted participation of graduate students in recruitment drives to its affiliated colleges: it facilitated about 400 placements every year to graduate students between 2014 and 2017, with six firms participating. Women graduates, on average, secured about 30 percent of the jobs.

With the introduction of the LEAP program in May 2017, APITA extended participation to eligible graduates from colleges not affiliated (with APITA), and thus provided them with an opportunity to participate in its recruitment drives. In academic years 2017–18 and 2018–19 (as of 30 September 2018), APITA facilitated placements for 11,921 graduate students through the LEAP program, with salaries ranging from rupees 84,000 per annum to rupees 9,00,000 per annum. Eighty-nine firms from the IT and the ITES, and two educational institutions participated in the LEAP program.

In all, 4,037 students from colleges not affiliated to APITA participated in the LEAP program, and of these 1,482 were successfully placed. The higher participation of students and recruiters alike, mediated by social platforms, resulted in women graduates securing 42 percent of the jobs on offer, indicating improved participation rates by women.

APITA spent about rupees 16 million on LEAP and other placement drives in 2017–18, implying a spend of about rupees 1,343 for every student placed in the industry. Clearly, such expenditure is not sustainable on a yearly basis.

It is evident that the special efforts of APITA, specifically in industry-relevant training and in facilitating placements for graduate students, influenced the IT education imparted by universities in AP as a whole. Do graduate students from APITA-affiliated colleges have an edge over those graduating from non-affiliated colleges with respect to industry placements and jobs? As mentioned in the introductory section, this study also seeks to understand whether women graduate students in AP perform significantly better than their male counterparts in industry placements. The following section develops the hypotheses and describes the data and the model employed to conduct the empirical tests.

The hypotheses and model

Drawing on the arguments and questions posed in section 1, and in the context of the efforts exerted by APITA in training and facilitating placements to graduate students described above, the following hypotheses are formulated:

H1: The entry-level salary (or cost-to-company (CTC) of graduates from colleges affiliated to APITA is higher than the entry-level salary of graduates from colleges that are not affiliated to APITA.

H2: The entry-level CTC of women IT graduates is lower than the entry-level CTC of male IT graduates.

To test these hypotheses, socioeconomic and demographic data of 1,650 graduate students from IT and related streams (fresh graduates, and those who graduated between 2015 and 2018) who were offered placements in private sector firms through the LEAP program and other job fairs organized by APITA in 2017–18 are analyzed through econometric estimation. As described above, eligible graduate students from both APITA-affiliated and from colleges not affiliated to APITA participated in the LEAP job drive in 2017–18, and the socioeconomic information for this cohort is required to test H1.

Some evidence suggests that students with higher academic abilities, as reflected in their grade point averages, tend to secure jobs with higher wages than those with lower academic abilities (EDUCAUSE Center for Analysis and Research, 2014; Rudakov and Roshchin, 2019). In their analysis of the determinants of future salaries of graduates from universities in Russia, Rudakov and Roshchin (2019) further show that, despite scoring higher grade point averages (GPAs) than male students, female graduates earn 18 percent less than males due to the over-representation of women in lowly-paid sectors like education. Compare this with the investigation by Tebaldi et al. (2017) in the USA who report that, while male students with higher GPAs at graduation secure higher salary levels and faster salary growth, GPAs have no impact on female graduates’ salary or salary growth. Soon et al. (2020) report, interestingly, that academic performance is not a determinant of salary for freshly graduated students in Malaysia. The literature on the impact of academic performance on graduate wages thus seems to be divided. This study seeks to investigate gender inclusivity in the IT industry by testing H2, while the industry relevance of the IT education offered by the educational institutions of AP state is examined by testing H1.

Some evidence points to the higher reputation of community colleges and educational institutions as a positive determinant of graduate salaries (Faber and Durst, 2020). In the econometric estimation for testing H1 and H2, the partial effects of higher academic abilities in the student and the reputational effects of the educational institution on the wages offered to graduates need to be accounted for. Dummy variables for capturing the registration status of educational institutions with APITA (to test H1) and gender (to test H2) are required in the econometric estimation.

Some studies show that performance of students in standardized tests like the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) or the American College Testing (ACT) are predictors of future salaries after graduation (Timothy and Raghav, 2016). In the context of this study, the students are selected for the degree courses in engineering through the common entrance test, which is a standard test administered by the government for recruiting students to professional courses in engineering and medicine. There is no standard examination of a similar nature for students graduating in science, arts, mathematics and commerce. The study sample consists of students from the engineering, science, arts, mathematics and commerce streams. In view of this heterogeneity and a lack of data, the performance of the student in standard tests was omitted in econometric estimation.

Institutional characteristics like opportunities for scholarship and the tuition fees charged also seem to influence students’ academic performance, and indirectly their future salaries after graduation (Faber and Durst, 2020). In view of the difficulty in obtaining this information from private educational institutions in AP, such institutional characteristics could not be included in the analysis.

The CTC of the graduate is the dependent variable, while his or her GPA, the perceived reputation of the college in the district as assessed by APITA (from the media and general enquiry), gender and the registration status of the student’s college with APITA are the independent variables. The variables employed in the econometric estimation are explained in Table 2.

Table 2.

Variables used in the model.

Variable	Definition
ctc	The graduate student’s entry level salary in placements facilitated by APITA, 2017–18 (in rupees); continuous variable
cgpa	The graduate student’s average grade point average secured in the qualifying degree course, scaled to 10; continuous variable
reput	Reputation of the college as assessed by APITA in the district as at 2017–18, and defined on a scale from 1 to 3, with 1 denoting “low reputation,” 2 “moderate reputation” and 3 “highly reputed”; defined as a set of two dummy variables reput2 and reput3, with reput1 as the reference group
female	=0 if male, 1 if female, and 2 if transgender; a categorical variable indicating the gender of the graduate student; male (=0) is the reference category
regis	=1 if registered with APITA, 0 otherwise; a binary variable indicating the registration status of the graduate student’s college with APITA

The population model is specified as follows:

Log (ctc) = β0 + β1*cgpa + β2*reput2 + β3*reput3 + β4*female1 + β5*female2 + β5*regis + u …

where u is the stochastic disturbance term.

The population model is estimated by the ordinary least squares (OLS) method in R. The dependent variable in (1), ctc, is the salary offered by the recruiting firm to the graduate student after the interview process. Students from reputed colleges and with higher scholastic abilities (as reflected in their individual cgpa) are expected to secure jobs with higher salaries than students with lower educational achievements and those graduating from colleges with a somewhat lower reputation. The student’s cgpa is used here as a proxy to account for his or her innate ability (Levine and Zimmerman, 1995; Neumark and Wascher, 1995).

The variables of interest are β4 and β5 (β4 is expected to be negative, while β5 is expected to be positive). Other factors (like parents’ educational attainment) may possibly impact the dependent variable, and are subsumed under the error variable (u) in (1).

An assumption of the model specified in (1) is that the errors are homoscedastic, serially uncorrelated, and are normally distributed, thereby implying that OLS yields the best, linear and unbiased estimators. The log form of the dependent variable is employed in econometric estimation as the ctc is a strictly positive variable, and this constant semi-elasticity model can mitigate the problem of heteroskedasticity and skewedness (Wooldridge, 2012).

The sample and the data

As has been noted, this article examines the placement details of 1650 graduate students from the 13 districts of AP for whom APITA had facilitated industry placements in 2017–18 through the LEAP program. Though APITA facilitated placements to 11,921 graduate students through the LEAP program in 2017–18, socioeconomic information for all these students was not fully available due to logistical issues and some errors in data capture. Further, some students did not take up the jobs secured through these industry placements for various reasons, including lower-than-expected salary, relocation problems and aspirations to pursue higher education. Data for these students, and for those for whom there was incomplete information, were excluded from the study, resulting in the consideration of the sample of 1650 graduate students for whom information was fully available. Table 3 provides a review of the sample statistics.

Table 3.

Sample statistics.

Variable	Mean	Standard deviation	Minimum	Maximum
ctc (rupees)	136,824	63,834	84,000	900,000
cgpa	7.27	1.04	4.3	10
reput	=1 (900)=2 (303)=3 (441)	—	—	—
female	=0 (1127)=1 (520)=2 (3)	—	—	—
regis	=0 (727)=1 (923)	—	—

Note: Number of observations = 1,650.

APITA obtained the ctc information from participating firms after the recruitment process, and based on the offer letters issued by firms to the selected graduate students. The average ctc is about rupees 136,824, with the maximum ctc at rupees 900,000, which was offered to four students for business development roles.

On average, the students secured a cgpa of 7.27 out of 10 points, the minimum being 4.3 in the qualifying degree. Students reported this information and other socioeconomic details (including gender and their parent college) to APITA during the placement registration, with documentary proof. Colleges affiliated to the various universities in AP reported the performance of their students in differing metrics. While most public universities reported students’ scores as a percentage, privately funded and some public universities reported their students’ performance in GPAs. In this article, the percentages and GPAs were scaled to 10 for purposes of uniformity.

In the study sample, 900 colleges commanded a high reputation at the district level, 303 colleges maintained a moderate reputation, and 441 colleges had a somewhat low reputation in their respective districts as assessed by APITA, based on media reports, and general enquiry.

The age of the students in the sample is not expected to influence the dependent variable as they are in a narrow age group between 20 and 23 years of age, with the average being 22.3. Gender, however, does matter in view of the differential approach of men and women graduates toward placements in terms of innate skills, communication skills, risk attitude and psychological preparedness to undergo the placement process. In the sample, 1,127 students were women, 520 were men, and 3 belonged to the transgender category.

The registration status of the college participating in LEAP and other placement drives conducted by APITA is one of the variables of interest (see H1). In the study sample, 923 colleges were registered with APITA, and the remaining 727 were not. The information on the registration status of the colleges was available from APITA.

Results and discussion

Table 4 reports the results of the estimation of the model in (1).

Table 4.

Predictors of students’ salary in IT industry placements in Andhra Pradesh, 2017–18.

Dependent variable: log (ctc)
Independent variables	Estimate
intercept	11.397*** (0.045)
cgpa	0.0364*** (0.006)
female1	0.110*** (0.014)
female2	0.0835 (0.149)
reput2	0.035* (0.017)
reput3	0.181*** (0.017)
regis1	0.038*** (0.014)
Number of observations	1650
R-squared	0.1968
F statistic	67.1 on 6 and 1643 df

Note: Standard errors in parentheses.

*0.05; **0.01; ***0.001.

The independent variables in (1) explain 19.68% of the variation in the ctc for this sample of 1,650 observations. Other characteristics, like the educational attainment of the parents, overall economic scenario, government policies on IT and exports of IT goods and services, which may have an impact on placement salaries were not included in the model in (1) due to lack of data. Finally, the F statistic of 67.1 at 6 and 1,643 degrees of freedom (df) show that the model described in (1) is jointly significant.

Effect of academic performance

The cgpa has a positive, and statistically significant effect on the ctc at any conventional significance level. Ceteris paribus, a one-point increase in cgpa is predicted to increase the ctc offered by 3.707 percent. This result is expected, as students with higher scholastic performance are much valued in the IT and the ITES industry, because better performing students in college usually perform well in jobs too and are expected to deliver more value to the recruiting firm than those with lower academic ability. The job market signals this higher competency by offering higher salary during placements.

Gender effects

On average, female students are predicted to earn 11.63% more than male students, after accounting for academic ability, the registration status of the college, the reputation of the college and other factors (the beta is estimated as [exp(0.11) − 1]*100). The result is statistically significant at conventional significance levels. Thus H2 is not supported, which implies that women students, on average, perform well on the placements front.

The rejection of H2 indicates that there is a wage premium attributable to gender insofar as entry-level salaries are concerned. The study sample shows that, at the entry level, women secured about one-third of the jobs on offer (in the LEAP program for 2017–18, women secured about 42% of the jobs offered), and the labor market offers higher salaries to women IT professionals in industry placements at the beginning of their career. However, women’s labor force participation in the IT sector dwindles to about 20 percent at the higher positions. A somewhat tenuous conclusion is that women IT professionals tend to be distracted from career progression due to social obligations.

APITA can identify women IT professionals who have suffered career breaks and can supplement their skill sets to help them back on their career track. It can additionally design modules for graduating women students in IT that leverage abilities attributable to gender in women-friendly business spaces like HR analytics, IT marketing and media analytics in which disruptive technologies are less frequent. This requires a thorough revamp of existing human resources management (HRM) policies at APITA, as there is a need to hire professionals and experts in gender inclusivity and culture studies.

Reputation effects

All things being equal, students from highly reputed colleges in a district are predicted to earn, on average, 19.84% more than students from colleges with a low reputation in the district. This too is an expected result, as colleges with a high reputation tend to have better teaching classrooms, good infrastructure and reputed faculty, and follow university regulations with reference to students’ attendance at classes, research publications of faculty, and industry engagements. These features may be lacking in colleges with a low reputation. Industry therefore prefers students from reputed colleges and signals this preference by offering higher salaries to students from such colleges during placements.

Registration with APITA

Ceteris paribus, students from colleges registered with APITA are predicted to earn 4.62% more than students from colleges not registered with APITA. Though this result is statistically significant at conventional significance levels, the effect is not practically large.

The support for H1 implies that the job market signals the higher quality of APITA-trained students by offering them significantly higher salaries than are offered to students from colleges not registered with APITA.

Conclusions and managerial implications

A limitation in drawing inferences through measured beta coefficients as above is the failure to pinpoint whether the performance of graduate students in placements is due to the higher quality of training inputs by APITA or to the better placement efforts through LEAP. This analysis could not be attempted due to the lack of data concerning the placement efforts through LEAP. It may be noted here that all the students from APITA-affiliated colleges participated in the LEAP program.

Achieving gender equality is one of the stated aims of the Sustainable Development Goals (Target 4.7), and this study alerts stakeholders to course correctives that may be required to prevent gender exclusion in high-end IT jobs in the long term. IT is an applied discipline and hence is offered in the engineering stream. Students opt for this discipline because of its potential to lead to a lucrative job. Adverse job scenarios for women students in the medium and long terms may affect student enrolment and are therefore a potential cause for concern for policy makers. Such scenarios are fueled by evidence that, although there has been a shift in societal attitudes toward accepting women IT professionals in India as equal partners to men in terms of skills, capabilities and competencies, women professionals are compelled to spend long hours in the workplace and are subject to sudden official tours which upset work–family balance (Bhattacharya and Bhola Nath, 2014). The paper describes this issue and highlights possible solutions.

The constraints facing APITA are also outlined in the study. As discussed in the preceding section, the salary offered to students from APITA-affiliated colleges is only marginally higher than salaries offered to students from colleges not registered with APITA. The effect, as already noted, is not economically significant. Participating IT firms often complained that some students lacked skills in communication. This resonates with the findings of Fuller and Narasimhan (2006), who observe that IT professionals in general lack good written and oral communication skills. This calls for an additional focus on training and skilling in newer segments, including communications, besides conventional IT subjects and tracks. APITA may have to cast its net wider to develop training content in non-traditional IT business spaces—such as education, pharmacy, rural services, financial technologies, art, media, gaming and entertainment—where IT is being increasingly adopted and the job roles offered seem more exciting. The LEAP program indicated that even seemingly unrelated business sectors, like real estate, chit funds and rural housing services, were interested in hiring IT and electronics professionals for delivering value. APITA must strive to satisfy industry requirements in these “unconventional” spaces, and may have to partner with skill development firms to scale up its offerings.

Certain other Indian states (including Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Himachal Pradesh, and Kerala) have organizations similar to APITA working with similar goals. A convergence of these organizations at the central level in the federated Indian polity seems desirable to take advantage of scale economies. Contemporary IT and ITES firms are mostly multinational corporations and so offer similar academic offerings in different locations in the country with minor customization. For example, the multinational firms Oracle, the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), and National Instruments foster computer and cyber security education through the Oracle Academy, the IBM Security Learning Academy, and the Labview Academy. It is also observed that some of these firms sell the same academic product at different price points in different geographies. These issues may be partially mitigated if the senior managers of information technology academies communicate with each other at regular forums, conferences and workshops. An umbrella organization at the central level which could integrate and synergize the capabilities of the state information technology academies might prevent re-inventing the wheel and ensure that the IT industry priced its academic products uniformly in the country. This would reduce operating costs for APITA (and other similar state level academies) and enable a more varied training and skilling service to the student community.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Sundar Balakrishna

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