Establishing cloud-based technological skills in higher education

The world has recognized the power of the cloud across a variety of businesses. Not only do they reduce the dependency on heavy infrastructure setup, but they also shrink operational expenditures while improving accessibility and scalability and opening up new possibilities for building open and productive collaborations.

Organisations can immensely benefit from this since it gives them more freedom to personalise their offerings both internally and to their customers.

However, in this highly competitive and innovative technology world, India's talent model continues reinventing itself from traditional skills to more robust cloud tech skills. India has been a hub for global IT-enabled managed services for ages. Yet, the main ingredient of India's Economic Growth Engine might face the change ahead in terms of capability and delivery.

There is a major gap in skill development in the education system of higher education in India. Primarily, the students are still learning traditional age-old technologies except in a few select cities, and thus the talent pool remains largely unemployable. Today organisations expect that the talent coming out of the college must possess both traditional skills as well as capabilities with new and emerging and sometimes unproven technologies as well.

With revolutionary innovations like Chat GPT, the talent is expected to harbour not just technical skills but also a more analytical mindset with more adaptability to change.

Cloud computing has the potential to transform education for teachers, students, and those who assist them, be it in K–12 and elementary schools, higher education, or ed tech.

With this, there is a strong need for the education sector to revamp the education programme in higher education to make them more aligned with the industry requirements.

Cloud skilling both from tech as well as from their application perspective must be an important part of the curriculum at engineering as well as management colleges.

That will not only help the students to upskill themselves apart from the traditional engineering and management skills but will help them leverage better employment opportunities.

A few important steps are needed to ensure better cloud technology skilling in higher education: -

1 Developing more integrated industry collaborations

This will help technology companies to run upskilling programs for their requirements during the education course itself and will help students keep up the skill development while learning their traditional course curriculum.

2 Continuous redesigning of the course curriculum

There is an imperative need to relook at the course curriculum every two years in a world where technology is ever-evolving and ensure that the course structure is aligned with the market requirements.

3 Enhanced accessibility

Educational institutes must also adapt to more accessible skill development programs. With the world gearing up for the 5G age, it's more important that the programs are accessible to all without the barriers of language, gender, religion, physical ability etc.

While there is a lot of work being done by ed-tech startups in these areas, the accessibility and adoption by the education sector to upskill the students will help them to be more employable and industry ready when they pass out. There is no denying that the future of higher education in India is bright but what worked for the last twenty years won't work in the near future. Educators need to gain a thorough understanding of cloud computing technology, follow the trends and figure out how it can help to redefine the concept of education.

(The author is the Associate Professor (Operations), Jaipuria School of Business, Ghaziabad)