The tax department has come to the help of career-course companies. Even as the

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recession had started biting into enrolments at NIIT, the government tied up with the IT educational company seeking training for a new set of facilitators — the tax return preparers. This helped NIIT to enrol 45 per cent more people at the peak of the slowdown in December last year, compared with the year before.

Companies like NIIT and Aptech are trying to rejig their courses to beat recession blues. Short-term job-oriented training courses are the new mantra, a shift from the knowledge-based ones. “In the past two years, education programmes have moved from IT to global talent development and therefore we launched courses in training for banking, finance, BPO, pre-placements offers, management training and accounting,” said CEO of Delhi-based NIIT Technologies Vijay K Thadani.

Many of these have been immediate success. Take for example of the tax return preparers. Around 50,000 graduates had appeared for the entrance test to the intensive 99-day course that is held from 9 to 5 every day, without any break. The company has certified 4,337 people so far.

Ninad Karpe, CEO and managing director of Aptech said the company had introduced short-term as well as long-term courses ranging from two-three months to three-years, working with companies such as Oracle, Thomas Cook and Cambridge University Press. “From February to May, there were not many enrolments, but from June, we have seen rapid growth, especially after the new bouquet of offerings,” he said.

Aptech is planning to expand its footprints to non-metros, especially to tier II and tier III cities. “We have geographical expansion plans, especially in the product innovation programmes and before the new-year starts, we will open new centres,” Karpe said.

NIIT has plans for rural areas too, but Thadani says they will focus is on advance learning. “Our core strength is to make sure that we train people in advance technology,” he said adding that it was working with 11 companies such as Microsoft, Oracle, IBM Technologies, Cisco, EMC and Adobe on specific programmes.