MSDE asks states to undertake skills training in AI, IoT

The ministry of skill development and entrepreneurship has written to states asking them to expand skills training to new age skills, including artificial intelligence and machine learning among others even as the Centre added 13 new courses to keep pace with changing technological needs of the industry.

The directorate general of training (DGT), the apex organization of MSDE for development and co-ordination of the vocational training across the country will be providing all possible technical support to the states for formulation of new proposals and training of instructors and trainers for such new-age courses, skills development ministry said in a statement.

The director general of training (DGT) has introduced 13 National Skills Qualification Framework (NSQF) compliant new-age courses that include data analysts and scientists, technician mechatronics, smart agriculture, cloud computing, process automation experts.

Besides, user experience and human-machine interaction designers, blockchain specialists, software and applications developers, geoinformatics assistants, AI and machine learning specialists, big data specialists, information security analysts, robotics engineers and ecommerce and social media specialists have been introduced, it said on Friday.

The duration of these training courses varies from six months to two years. For this, DGT has collaborated with IBM India, SAP India, Microsoft Corp. (India) Ltd., NASSCOM, Quest Alliance, Accenture and CISCO etc.

“The new wave of technology revolution is poised to change the nature of jobs and in order to keep pace with this changing nature, we need to undertake skilling of future workforce in relevant technology areas to meet the future demands of industries,” skills minister Mahendra Nath Pandey said.

According to the statement, the minister said the need of the hour is to restructure the current academic framework of ITIs to offer more robust technical programs in new technology areas of Industrial Revolution 4.0 like data analytics, internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence, cloud computing, blockchain etc.

The skills development ministry is of the view that the technologies in manufacturing and services are rapidly transforming and the mechanical and manual interventions are increasingly becoming digitally and artificial-intelligence led. “This makes it imperative that the ITIs are able to train new collar workers who are adept in these technologie,” it said.