It is an incredible achievement that for forty-three years, NIIT has remained rooted in its commitment towards training and continues to remain steadfast in that journey, unswerving in its mission and purpose, undaunted by the vicissitudes and disruptions of the internet age, and constantly emerging stronger and better equipped than before to face the business and pedagogical challenges of the times. For many organizations, training is just another function, dispensable at times, but for us at NIIT, training in all its manifestations is our core competency and the only goal we carry in our hearts.
For four decades now, since our founders set up our first retail training center in Mumbai with a view to spreading IT literacy in a country that was beginning to feel the effects of computerization, we have lived with the principle that training for us is not just business but equally a social responsibility, it is the surest way of empowering people to lead richer lives and achieve economic mobility. We realized early that the demand for knowledge workers will exponentially grow in the future, and we were prescient enough to carve out a niche for ourselves in this space. The progress of a society is often proportional to how skilled its people are and, more importantly, how soon they can adapt or learn skills to meet the changing needs of the times. Arnold Toynbee, one of the great synthesizers of historical forces, observed in his six-volume study of history that “Civilizations ……proceed to grow by successfully responding to successive challenges. They break down and go to pieces if and when a challenge confronts them which they fail to meet.” This is true of the modern world as it was for those early civilizations now lost in the mists of time.
With AI and automation challenging the existing workforce, fresh perspectives and newer sets of skills are required to stay relevant in the workplace and grow. NIIT is gearing up to meet this challenge of AI in the same way as we did in the early 1980s when spreadsheets threatened to disrupt the administrative and accounting workforce ( in India), and we taught Lotus1-2-3 ( a spreadsheet application like Excel from Lotus software which is now defunct) in our classrooms to an emerging workforce. I still remember the joy and rapture I felt as a student when I keyed in a dataset into Lotus 1-2-3, and the software summed it up for me through an in-built function. Today, AI applications like ChatGPT are producing the same thrill in users, and there is a demand to know how to harness its enormous potential to increase efficiency and productivity. We are working on cutting-edge learning solutions to fulfill this need.
What began as an exciting training opportunity at Mumbai in the early eighties is today a global training organization serving customers across geographies and domains. Every NIITian begins his workday with the thought that his contribution will touch the lives and have a positive impact on learners somewhere around the globe. It could be a NIITian managing the logistics of a corporate learning session, carefully crafting a piece of content, teaching a class, selling an NIIT learning solution, or performing any role that scaffolds or supports the learning function in some way – each one of them is our proud brand ambassador. The common thread that binds us all in our journey together is the warm yet professional culture that NIIT has fostered over the years, ably spearheaded by our business leaders with vision, pragmatism, empathy and people-oriented management skills. It is always great to be a NIItian, more so in these exciting times ahead.
Happy foundation day to all.