New Delhi, March 26, 2009: In its attempt to bridge the Education-Employability gap and create talent pool in urban slums, leading Global Talent Development Corporation, NIIT, today announced the setting up of NIIT Yuva Star, a Career Development Centre (CDC) at Jahangirpuri, New Delhi in association with NGO Navjyoti India Foundation. Dr. Kiran Bedi, General Secretary of Navjyoti India Foundation and Mr. Rajendra S Pawar, Chairman, NIIT Ltd., inaugurated the Career Development Centre, Jahangirpuri, Delhi.
NIIT Yuva Star, the Career Development Centre (CDC) will serve as a vocational training centre in Jahangirpuri, providing employability skills to youth in the age group 17-25 years. The CDC will provide relevant skills to the unemployed youth for making them employable for jobs in various industry sectors such as retail, automobile sales, telecommunications, hospitality, healthcare etc. Additional skill sets will be addressed going forward as per requirements of partnering organizations. The students will be provided with internship and placements with the purpose of helping them find employment in the corporate sector.
Speaking on the occasion, Mr. Rajendra S Pawar, Chairman, NIIT Ltd. said, “NIIT Yuva Star is yet another initiative by NIIT to unleash the power of youth from urban slums.”
Dr. Kiran Bedi, General Secretary, Navjyoti India Foundation, said, “NIIT Yuva Star has made a great impact in the lives of the underprivileged youth of urban slums. Our foundation was set up with the aim of making the society self reliant. We are pleased to come together with NIIT for this project and hope to contribute towards the overall development of society.”
NIIT Yuva Star is an initiative by the Not-for-profit education society- The NIIT Institute, setup by NIIT to empower the youth in urban slums. This is the second such centre to be established after the flagship centre at Tughlakabad village in New Delhi. The CDCs are launched in association with the resident NGOs such as Navjyoti India Foundation for the Jahangirpuri Center.
About TNI
The NIIT Institute (TNI) is a not-for-profit society promoted by NIIT and has access to 25 years of NIIT’s IT Training, Education Management and Industry collaboration experience. TNI has the dual advantage of NIIT’s core competence in the areas of training creation and delivery and its huge combined experience base of catering to marginalized sections of society. TNI will leverage NIIT’s content and pedagogical expertise and design training content after analyzing industry requirements. These 3-dimensional training programs will equip students to become employable by training them on industry-specific skills in addition to basic IT, workplace productivity tools, English as a spoken language and other professional skills.
As a key mission, TNI aims at positively impacting the underprivileged of the country through its educational process and has identified a large number of employable youth in urban slums and other semi-rural areas. The education of these youth does not make them employable as per the current industry requirements and, therefore, their current competencies show up a lack of appropriate communication, grooming, etiquette, and attitude. This reflects in their current personality make up that renders them as unemployable even at the entry level.
TNI is leveraging technology to enhance the learning experience in their CDC project. The planned courses, length of training, courseware and pedagogy come from past training experience and extensive research conducted by NIIT. The CDCs will also work at motivating and providing supplementary education to school students at classes 8+ level so that students complete Class 12 successfully. Also, the CDC will run evening classes for the employed youth in the community – imparting further vocational skills as well as professional life skills for them to look at higher levels of employment.