Sector Skills Council NASSCOM, NCVET announce industry courses with Red Hat

As the need to adopt emerging technologies permeates across sectors and industries, businesses, academia, and the government are accelerating their efforts on skilling, reskilling , and upskilling the country’s youth to become future-ready. Paving the way to make the industry’s training courses and programs to be recognized by universities and colleges for academic credits, Sector Skills Council (SSC) NASSCOM today announced a collaboration with Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, to offer the first set of six Red Hat Training courses aligned to National Skill Qualification Framework (NSQF). Accepted by NCVET (National Council for Vocational Education and Training), these courses will be available on SSC NASSCOM platforms. The courses include: Red Hat Linux System Administration I, Red Hat Linux System Administration II, Red Hat OpenShift Development I, Red Hat OpenStack Administration I, Red Hat Linux Automation with Ansible and Red Hat Application Development I.

This comes as a backdrop to the clarion call made by the Hon’ble Minister for Skills Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE) Shri Dharmendra Pradhan and the Hon’ble MoS Skills Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE) Shri Rajeev Chandrasekhar to skill 1 crore Indians on Emerging Technologies. The initiative revolves around bringing existing, highly popular courses and skills offered by the Industry, into recognition by NCVET using the NSQF (National Skills Qualification Framework). With the acceptance of these Red Hat Training courses by NCVET, the Red Hat courses and programs become nationally recognized in India with the possibility for them to be recognized by Universities and Colleges for academic credit.

Announcing the alignment of the first set of courses from Red Hat to NSQF, Dr. Nirmaljit Singh Kalsi, Chairman NCVET, said, “NCVET’s role is that of a facilitator to help build the skilling ecosystem in India. Along with establishing regulations and standards to ensure quality, NCVET works closely to understand the needs of the Industry and to enable the pathway for learners to transition from learning environments to work environments. In collaboration with Awarding Bodies like NASSCOM, we have been able to successfully bridge this gap and look forward to more global technology leaders joining this initiative.”

Speaking on the announcement, Kirti Seth, CEO, SSC NASSCOM, said, “Global technology providers (OEMs/Partners) play a crucial role in shaping the landscape of the new digital frontier and act as constructive contributors to the vision of Digital India. Encouraging the use and acceptance of industry ready skilling courses designed by them will open the gates to multiple avenues for learners in India. This also paves the way for such courses to be recognized by educational institutions for academic credits. We will continue to work with Red Hat in addition to other leading global technology providers such as AWS, Salesforce, Microsoft, CISCO, Oracle and others along with the government to get their courses approved by NCVET and make them credit equivalent in colleges.”

As part of the initiative, Global Technology Providers were tasked by the Government of India to identify courses, assessments, and certifications on key emerging technologies. SSC NASSCOM acted as the catalyst that brought together various policymakers, government bodies, and the industry for this mass-scale skilling initiative on emerging technologies. Creating a trifecta of “Course-Certification Job Role” this gives an opportunity to every citizen of India above the age of 16 to upskill/reskill themselves industry-recognized courses and achieve academic credits under the National Credit Framework (NCrF) from universities and colleges. This will pave the way for diversifying learning paths and skills for an individual and at the same time assigns credit-based value to different levels of learning- including academics, skilling and experiential learning.

Vikram Motiani, Senior Director, Global Learning Services (APAC), Red Hat said “Open source is at the core of digital transformation. Globally, the demand for open source knowledge and skills has exceeded the supply across many industries today. Red Hat, being the world’s leading provider of enterprise open source solutions and with its first set of six courses being approved as NSQF aligned, will work together with the academic regulatory bodies, institutions, students and the industry to address the open source skills gap, helping the youth to enhance their employability and be future ready for the global digital economy.”

Vikram further added that ‘by offering Red Hat authored courses and learning resources, our workforce development initiatives can help the youth of India kickstart their technology career and introduce them to new and emerging technologies as they pursue their academic priorities.”

CT Bureau