NIIT, Chinese varsities in talks

Seeking to expand one of its profitable overseas ventures, leading IT education provider NIIT is in discussions with various Chinese universities to forge business partnerships for offering courses at the advanced IT education level.

"China has currently five lakh software professionals compared to India's over 10 lakh and NIIT is aggressively planning to train more number of students than it currently does. At present, it trains about 45,000 students every year", Prakash Menon, GM, NIIT China told PTI.

"We already have a tie-up with over 35 universities in China and are talking to more universities for business partnership where our courses could be offered to students as part of the university curriculum", he said.

He said the advantage of tying up with a university is that NIIT gets to use the existing infrastructure of the varsity and is able to tap the vast number of students at this stage to be trained.

NIIT, which entered China in 1997, already has 100 training centres in 25 provinces. Most of these centres are run by business partners.

Menon said NIIT was focussing on providing high-end training to aspiring and existing project managers and its GNIIT programme (graduate-equivalent) is its most sought-after programme in China.

A year ago, the company also started offering ASPM programme -- Advanced Software Project Management -- and is already catching up with Chinese IT project managers, he said.

Menon said the company is expecting a new kind of customer in the Chinese government, whose managers NIIT is hoping to train over the next few months. "Our new customer is going to be the government", he said.

NIIT, China is already a profitable venture and the company is very much bullish on the world's most populated country, he said, adding it is both an opportunity and challenge.

NIIT was the first Indian company to get wholly owned foreign entity status, allowing it to set up professional education centres in China.