Information Technology Is No Longer the Only Option For Someone Majoring in IT

India will soon have more IT professionals than the US by the end of 2018. Currently India has over 2 mn IT professionals and 1 mn creative technologists who need continuous technology learning to stay ahead of the curve.

Pluralsight is a technology learning platform built by technologists for technologists. The company provides a holistic learning experience with content, online assessments, skill paths, live mentoring and personalization. It has over 6000 courses on software development IT operations and creative technology and covers all areas of cloud, design thinking and tools, mobile app and product development, data analytics and data science and a host of digital skill areas.

How is Pluralsight Better than other online tutorials?

According to Andy Rahden, VP Creative Design and Engineering, Pluralsight, the company believes in the 4-stage cyclical process of learning: Evaluation-Learning Path-Constant Measurement-Professional Help.

Pluralsight first work with our customers to evaluate their employees on the future technologies that they want to build. This gives them a current assessment of where they are on the map. “We then give them skill paths that we have designed to help them get from their base skill level to the target skill level. If the customer wants to create their own skill path, we provide a feature called channels that help them do it. We provide them with advanced analytics to show how their employees are progressing on the skills index and lastly we provide a global mentor network that can provide real-time professional help a technologist as he is learning a course or working on a live project. This provides an enterprise CTO with a robust platform to drive the underlying skills transformation that needs to drive digital transformation. On the creative technology side, we have 21 skills paths with assessments that cover key areas like Adobe, AutoCAD, Game development, 3D Modeling, Solidworks and a variety of other skills,” he said.

India will soon have more IT professionals than the US by the end of 2018. Currently India has over 2 mn IT professionals and 1 mn creative technologists who need continuous technology learning to stay ahead of the curve. “We have over 300 enterprise customers in India and the hours of learning that we are logging from India has grown by 250% in the last 2 years. We have both a B2B and B2C model globally and in India and we enable employers to purchase annual learning licenses for their employees and also enable individuals to buy learning licenses monthly and annually for their self-development. We also partner with OEMs like Adobe, AutoDesk, Microsoft, Oracle etc. to co-develop content, assessments, skill paths for cloud and design with them and become their training partners globally,” he further added.

The company works with all leading IT companies in India and is rapidly expanding into the retail, automotive and manufacturing space.

E-Learning platform Help IT Companies to Enhance And Upskill Their Employees:

Companies are beginning to move from the classroom led corporate training model to a full-online or a blended model combining both forms. Pluralsight helps IT companies evaluate current skill levels of their employees against future skills direction. E-Learning platform helps companies to upskill their employees in the following ways:

• Mapping learning to business objectives and Hyper-personalization of learning experience

Leveraging data and analytics from online learning platforms, enterprises can invest in segmenting their employee base based on their current skill levels through online assessments and tailor the learning content towards what they need to learn for re-skilling with dedicated learning paths. They can also determine learning styles (for example – just in time learners, byte sized learners, sequential learners) and use e-learning platforms to deliver hyper-personalized learning experiences for them for maximum effectiveness. Enterprises can also determine e-learning for custom learning solutions for the entire Hire2Retire cycle – new hire on-boarding, role-skill mapping, skill transformation, zero bench, cross-skilling, up-skilling etc.

• Make re-skilling collaborative with Gamification and Live Mentoring

Enterprises are incorporating gamification on e-learning platforms to make learning fun and interesting thereby making re-skilling more effective. Gamification brings in elements of competitiveness, pride and prize into learning programs. Gamification will also bring in the social element to learning. Enterprise learners show-off their skills and learning progress online to their peers on a global online dashboard. Learners are also assessing themselves against the skills of their global peers to determine their current skill levels and tapping into the expertise of their colleagues with online enterprise mentoring networks. With India, already one of the world’s leading gaming and game development markets, learners are welcoming gamification features in learning platforms as an extension of what they are used to in the online entertainment sector.

• Balancing Push vs. Pull-based in re-skilling

While re-skilling, Enterprises are balancing between prescriptive learning and a learn-as-you-wish approach or in other words, a push vs. pull approach to learning. This will give enough freedom to learners to explore skills on their own while sticking to employer guidelines on target skills. E-learning platforms allow employers to define learning channels that are prescriptive while also providing freedom to employees to learn skills that they desire above and beyond what their employer wants them to.

• Re-skilling needs a Journey view of Learning vs. a milestone view

In an increasing evolving tech environment, learning must become a lifelong activity for professionals and a continuous investment for companies. While there are several e-learning business models out there, choosing a subscription-model is the best way to ensure that learning never stops at say one course or one certification, but continues to grow as you progress in your career. With cloud-learning coming to the fore, professionals can now subscribe to monthly or annual packages and get access to thousands of courses and enterprises can leverage subscriptions to cater to diverse re-skilling needs of their organizations

Pluralsight Helps Entry Level Techies

Pluralsight works with customers across the hire2retire cycle. Today it takes our customers, 6-months post-joining to get a college hire into a live project. “Our solution NEO (New Employee On boarding) helps customers shorten this timeline to a fraction by leveraging the Pluralsight and Code School platforms to engage with offered candidates during the final semester of their course program. This helps a company assess and craft a learning path on Pluralsight for new hires even before they join work so that on Day 1, they have a good grounding on technology and can be deployed quickly,” he said.

Rahden concluded by saying that we find that students in India are increasingly getting interested in leveraging their technology skills in the creative space. Information technology is no longer the only option for someone majoring in IT. One can work on becoming a game developer or animator or marketing analytics expert with coding skills instead of only aiming to become a software developer.