About NAC – NASSCOM Assessment of Competence
The ITeS-BPO industry is growing at an overwhelming pace and giving a major fillip to the Indian economy. India has established its leadership position globally in the offshoring market and now the availability of skilled manpower is one of the key barriers to the fast growth of the industry.

NASSCOM along with program manager, has been working with the Indian ITeS-BPO industry players to create a national assessment and certification program - the NASSCOM Assessment of Competence (NAC). The initiative is aimed at creating a robust and continuous pipeline of talent. This will be done by continuously assessing candidates on key skills through a national standard assessment, thus making it easier for firms to screen candidates and also provide training need analysis to candidates. This will then be tied in to training and development efforts to help more candidates become competent to work in the industry.

NASSCOM is following a multi-pronged approach to facilitate manpower development for the short and long term. By following a two-phase strategy, NASSCOM is aiming to build a pool of ITeS-BPO manpower which will be pre-certified, in tune with the needs of the industry and thereby gear up for the future requirements of the sector.

In Phase I of this initiative, NASSCOM is looking at creating an Assessment and Certification Program which becomes an industry standard and ensures the transformation of a "trainable" workforce into an "employable” workforce.

Pilot phase I approach
In-depth meetings with close to 35 players in the ITeS-BPO industry were conducted to understand their recruitment practices, cause of attrition desired skills in a candidate, etc. Based on this, a job-skill matrix was developed which formed the basis for the design of this assessment program.

Core and Working Committees from the industry were formed and constant interactions were made to make sure that the program has everything that the industry requires in terms of a pre-employment assessment. An evaluation committee was set up to finalize the vendors and decide on the approach to the pilot.

Multi-tier evaluation of the vendors happened after the initial interaction RFI was sent to select 19 vendors. Based on their response, 11 vendors qualified for presentation to evaluation panel. Evaluation panel selected four vendors with whom the project team structured the pilot phase. These vendors provided the content and technology to run the pilot.

Selected companies from the industry, identified by NASSCOM, partnered in deployment of the pilot program. The locations for the first stage of pilot were identified as Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Bangalore and Chennai.

Pilot phase II approach
In NAC phase II, NASSCOM would run NAC with identified deemed Universities / Colleges in various states. The target audience for phase II is going to be final-year students who’ll be venturing into the job markets after few months. The intent behind assessing these students is to analyze the level of talent which is available in various parts of India, especially in tier-2 and tier-3 cities. Gauging this would eventually help identify the various regions in India where the readily available ITeS-BPO fit talent pool exists; also the pool that requires certain training before it is ready to join the industry.

Sikkim’s experience
(NASSCOM'S focus to promote class B & class C cities for IT employment)

About 450 engineering students from Sikkim-Manipal Institute of Technology (SMIT, Sikkim) sat for NAC assessment on 03-05 March 06.

Under NAC pilot phase-II, SMIT became the first academic body to run NAC. A special session preceded the NAC Assessment where NASSCOM spoke with different departments of SMIT to provide them an understanding on NAC and its objective.

The assessment turned out to be a good "self-assessment" exercise for all the participants. According to the students, this came as an eye-opener for them as they felt that NAC is a well thought of and a well-designed assessment, which ensures to check the soft skills of a person along with some of the basic academic skills. They realized that irrespective of the academic background a person comes from or the professional aspirations that he/she carries, the skills incorporated in NAC are a "must" for employment.

Skill Competence - Testing Themes

Skills / Modules	Duration in minutes	Items	Note/Description	Mode of delivery
Speaking	25	Candidates will be asked to read a passage and speak on a topic that is given to them.	Parameters assessed will be prosody, voice clarity, fluency and grammar. Duration will include preparation time taken by candidate (5 minutes).	Telephonic/Computer based Trained evaluators / voice assessors will assess the candidates on mentioned parameters
Listening	25	30	Conversation in neutral English will be played on computer followed by questions based on the conversation	Online
Analytical and Quantitative Reasoning	20	30	Analytical and logical reasoning questions like puzzles, data sufficiency, inductive and deductive logic will have to be solved by the candidate. Numerical reasoning will include percentages, averages, profit and loss type of questions	Online or Paper/Pen
Writing (multiple choice)	20	30	Checking of grammar, vocabulary, reading comprehension etc.	Online or Paper/Pen
Writing (essay)	20	1-2 short essays	Checking of content, relevance, grammar and vocabulary.	Online or Paper/Pen
Learning Ability	20	10	Checks if a person has the ability to learn new things and retain them.	Online or Paper/Pen
Keyboard Skill	5	2	Checks if the candidate is comfortable in using the keyboard and also if the candidate can enter data into fields accurately. The test has two parts - Free-Flow and Data Entry. The free-flow version allows the candidate to replicate/re-type a passage in the given time. It assesses candidate’s speed and accuracy. The Data Entry version allows the candidate to type alphanumeric content into text fields provided. It assesses candidate’s accuracy.	Online
Total	145

Benefits for the industry
NASSCOM Assessment of Competence will help industry to create an "assessed and certified" talent workforce to cater their "skilled manpower" requirements. Some of the key benefits will be as follows:

1. A national standard for recruitment of entry level talent
2. Substantial cost savings in industry’s sourcing cost
3. Ease of benchmarking for individual processes with industry standards
4. Ability to create visibility and reach out to a larger audience
5. Ability to filter out non-serious candidates and hence have improved efficiency
6. Cost savings through cutting off steps from the recruitment process resulting in reduced cycle time and more efficient utilization of resources
7. Cost savings through reduced training hours in full blown operation

Benefits for job aspirants
For a job aspirant in the ITES-BPO industry, NAC will provide following benefits:

1. A common, transparent process across companies in the ITES-BPO sector
2. No need to go through the same recruitment process at different companies
3. Ability to identify his/ her strengths and weaknesses
4. Ability to self-assess his/her training needs
5. Opportunity to get certified on a national level under NASSCOM

Benefits for training companies
A robust training backend framework is necessarily required to make any assessment successful, which also holds true for NASSCOM Assessment of Competence. There is a need to align this assessment in a manner that it helps the industry with assessment and recruitment of right talent; and also provides training need inputs to the candidates and to the training firms. Also, Educational Institutions and Universities can work to align the curriculum to the changing industry trends on the basis of this assessment.

• The key tenets for this alignment are:
• The central assessment of candidates will be a filtering criterion for employers and a training need assessment for candidates
• The candidates will be advised specific training modules as a part of the result based on their NAC performance
• The employers will provide incentives to candidates who come through this assessment
• Over time, the intent is that the industry should be hiring candidates only who come through NAC

Governments' role in NAC
NASSCOM is encouraging State Governments to commit to this program by conducting NAC with their respective deemed universities / colleges. Also, they shall urge other State Governments to align their employment initiatives with NASSCOM Assessment of Competence.

We envisage that NAC will immensely help the industry across India with active participation and support from various State Governments in implementing NAC, which has been designed and developed after due deliberation and support from all industry players across India. Some of the major benefits for State Governments will be as follows:

• Employment generation
• Help in attracting serious investors
• Will help create a concept of 'education' to 'employability'

In addition to the above, NAC will be an open standard and other industries will be welcomed to use the same for their talent benchmarking and recruitment. NASSCOM is open to explore the opportunity of rolling out NAC like assessment in locations beyond India, if the same fits in well with NASSCOM’s members and they demand the same.

National roll-out of NAC has begun
NAC is currently being rolled out in partnership with multiple states in India. In 15-18 months, the NAC is expected to be administered on a fix calendar basis 4-6 times a year; with multiple states signing on for any of the above dates. The NAC pilot testing started on August 20, 2005. Before launching NAC, NASSCOM and industry players judged the success of pilot based on following criteria:

• NAC’s alignment to sourcing requirement
• Feedback on the ability of participating vendors to deliver
• Validity post training
• Impact on job performance

After the successful completion of pilot, NASSCOM began the process of National roll-out of NAC, which started from the state of Rajasthan. The first NAC administration under this roll-out took place at Jaipur and Ajmer on 18th November 2006. NAC received an overwhelming response and over 2500 candidates were tested on that day.

Rajasthan NAC Job Fair
On 31st March 07–01st April 07, a job fair was conducted at Jaipur for candidates who took NAC test in the month of November 2006 at Rajasthan. This was a step further beyond the assessment platform that was provided to the job aspirants in that region.

Eleven of the top ITES-BPO companies participated in the job fair and some of them even made offers to the candidates on the spot, which basically talks about the success of NAC. A complete analysis will be carried out on this exercise and learning will be incorporated in further similar exercises to churn out better results.
Next states to join the bandwagon are Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Chandigarh, Tamil Nadu, etc. Gradually, over a year’s period, NAC should spread across 25-30 cities in India.

For further details on NAC, please contact Dr. Sandhya Chintala, Director (Education Initiatives) / Mr. Nikhil Gupta, Manager (NAC Initiative) at nac@nasscom.in

Frequently Asked Questions

• Where does Indian ITeS-BPO industry stand today?
  Indian ITeS-BPO sector industry continues to grow from strength to strength, witnessing high levels of activity - both onshore as well as offshore. The last year witnessed vendors move up the value-chain to offer higher-end research and analytics services to their MNC clients. The industry clocked export revenue of US$ 5.2 billion in FY 2004-05 registering a 40% growth from FY 2003-04. The ITeS-BPO sector also created around 100,000 jobs in the sector adding the total employment to 348,000 in the same period. According to various research agencies and the ITeS-BPO sector will continue to register phenomenal growth rate and will register revenue of US$ 17-18 billion and employment generation of 1 million people by CY 2009.
  
  
• What role do ITeS-BPO companies play in NAC?
  Industry will continue to play the central role in the initiative. For the pilot phase, participating organizations will be expected to contribute resources, wherein they would be required to run NAC with their company employees. Opinions of the organizations, which are not part of the pilot, will also be sought after to ensure that the system being designed has complete alignment with the industry requirements. This, as a whole, would help accomplish the benchmarking for the industry and also for individual companies at a micro level.
  
  During the National roll-out, industry will play a crucial role in lending credibility to the certification and in ensuring that the same gets differentiated in the market amongst other similar products. Companies would support the program by various means and ensure that, over a period of time, hiring at entry level happens only through NAC.
  
  
• What is the progress on NAC initiative?
  The process of National roll-out of NAC started from the state of Rajasthan in the month of November 2006. There are multiple states that will be covered gradually. Schedules regarding the same shall be published at NASSCOM website time-to-time and will also be circulated through various media channels.
  
  
• Who will own this program going forward?
  NASSCOM, on behalf of the industry, will continue to play the central role. However, the plan is to form a governing council / board to oversee the initiative and its overall working. The business model of this program will fund the governing body’s functions.
  
  
• Are there any training programs / courses that I can attend before joining the industry?
  However NAC encapsulates skills which are very basic in nature, you may still get yourself trained on certain specific areas which you feel seeking improvement on. The ITeS-BPO industry is vertical specific i.e. the work done at any ITeS-BPO organization mainly caters to industry verticals like BFSI (Banking, Financial Services & Insurance), Administration, Sales, Marketing, Research and any process which is not core to the customer. An experience in related industry vertical would also be helpful. The ITeS-BPO sector worldwide is customer centric and you need to cat all levels of hierarchy with various kinds of soft skills.
  
  
• How will this certification program benefit me?
  This program will provide you with your scores on different skills captured in NAC. You can apply to different companies across India on the basis of these scores and need not go through similar selection processes at different companies.
  
  
• How can I participate in the program?
  NAC has started to tap multiple states of India, Rajasthan being the very first, where NAC was administered in November 2006. As NAC reaches your city, you shall get to know so through various media channels / promotional activities and you can then get yourself enrolled for the same.
  
  
• What is the basic qualification required to participate in the program?
  The minimum qualification required is graduation (10+2+3)
  
  
• Do I need to pay for this program?
  Once the NAC national launch happens, candidates will have to pay a nominal registration fee. Details will be notified at the time of launch of the program.
  
  
• What are the skills being assessed?
  Please see – “Skill Competence - Testing Themes”
  
  
• Will people have access to NAC from small towns like Trivandrum or Guwahati?
  After national roll-out takes place, candidates will be able to appear for NAC even from small towns; however, it would be a gradual process, as explained above. We envisage that in a year’s time from now, NAC will be available in 30-35 cities across India.
  
  
• Whom should we contact at NASSCOM for further details?
  For further details on NAC, please contact Dr. Sandhya Chintala, Director (Education Initiatives) / Mr. Nikhil Gupta, Manager (NAC Initiative) at nac@nasscom.in

Rajasthan NAC Experience
Successful conduct of NAC at Rajasthan was nothing short than achieving a milestone as it was accepted to the highest degree by the young ITES-BPO job aspirants and as a result, over 2500 candidates were test on a single day, i.e. 18th November 2006. The initiative was supported by Department of IT&C, Department of Higher Education, Department of Technical Education - Government of Rajasthan.

Prior to administration of NAC, awareness needed to be generated amongst common people about NAC, its objectives and its future. To meet the purpose, various colleges / universities in Rajasthan were talked to and briefed upon the subject and were also invited to participate in the exercise. Promotional campaigns were run with the help of press ads, hoardings and radio etc. Seminars were conducted at many colleges along with industry representatives and students were educated on ITES-BPO industry and about NAC.

With all this, NAC received an overwhelming response and the test was effectively conducted on 18th November 2006 for 2500+ candidates. Post assessment, the results were provided to the candidates in 2 months’ time and they were also informed about the NAC job fair that was conducted for Rajasthan NAC participants.

After result declaration and certain analyses on the same, NAC job fair was conducted at Jaipur where 11 of top ITES-BPO companies participated and hired candidates. This clearly proved to be a fruitful exercise for all; especially for the local residents as they got the opportunity to get interviewed by companies from even outside Rajasthan.

A complete analysis on job fair exercise shall be performed and be utilized for further similar endeavors with a view to attain better consequences.