BANGALORE: Hyderabad-based SQL Star, an IT education and training company, is planning tie-ups with colleges across the country to ‘harvest talent’ for industry needs.

Mr Shishir Srivastava, Head of Education, SQL Star International Ltd, told Business Line that this initiative would be an extension of their Star Start programme that they currently run for students. Star Start enables students to enroll for IT education programmes at any of the SQL centres in the country. “But having our centres within college campuses will enable better access to IT education,” he said. The company is in talks with ‘several colleges’ across the country for the same.

SQl Star has an Enterprise Services Division, which supports the Knowledge Division by providing consultants as faculty. “Our pool of consultants work in both parts of the business to give students exposure to business needs,” according to Mr Srivastava. In fact, SQL’s Knowledge Harvesting process identifies top performers and students are further given the opportunity to work on live projects of the services segment of SQL Star.

This captured expertise is then arranged in a systematic from and these consultants can teach on their specific specialisation subject to incoming students. Thus their experience as consultants is translated into classroom teaching.

SQL Star has 10 training centres at present and plans to increase this to 20 in the next few months, through new centres in Tier II cities.

Source : THE HINDU BUSINESS LINE (9th May, 2006)