CMR University ties up with IBM to provide cloud, analytics and IT in management curricula

CMR University of Bangalore is collaborating with IBM to offer undergraduate and graduate level program curricula focused on cloud computing, business analytics and IT applications in Finance / Management, to provide students with the needed skills for jobs in these fields.

According to a NASSCOM HR survey, recruiters are looking for skill base trained in mobility, social media, cloud and big data. The top five tech skills in demand are data scientists, cloud / virtualisation, mobile apps, platform engineering and user experience demand.

According to NASSCOM, recruitment based on pure technical skills has reduced drastically from 85 per cent in the period 2000-2006. In 2006-2011, about 65 per ecnt of people were employed based on technical skills and 22 per cent for domain skills and the balance for soft skills. However, from 2011 onwards, hiring based on technical skills was down to 40 per cent, with domain skills getting equal importance with 40 per ct and soft skills forming the rest at 20 per cent.

IBM's collaboration with CMR University aims to reduce this technical skills gap of students. As part of IBM's Innovation Centre for Education Program, IBM will provide CMR University the design and delivery of innovative curricula integrated with a learning management system from IBM's business partner.

''There is a strong demand for skilled technology and trained management professionals. The IBM Innovation Center for Education initiative will equip the students, at CMR University, to adapt to the dynamics in the industry and drive technology and business innovation. Cloud and analytics courses will provide deep theoretical knowledge in students, coupled with broad-based industry alignment, interaction, talent discoverability as well as excellence in their professional practice,'' said Subram Natarajan, Executive - STG Technical Sales, IBM India South Asia.

Degrees will be awarded by CMR University. The agreement includes curriculum consultancy with IBM and co-development of courseware (on current technologies like cloud / business analytics / mainframe / infrastructure / open source / telecom and IT applications in management.  The students will be able to access online course material, discussion forums and other online collaborative functionality's including their project work. IBM will also provide train-the-teacher workshops to the faculty, along with webinars and seminars by connecting industry subject matter experts.

IBM will help present real-world application scenarios as project definitions, which describe a typical large application problem in a domain (such as banking, financial services and insurance, retail or healthcare). The assets include data schematics which describe the underlying data structures and the module description which are completed in teams of 3 - 4 students for each project.

The overall categories covered in the program include management, finance and information technology and will become available during the academic year 2014-15, commencing July - August 2014.

IBM will provide CMRU with curricula materials, case study projects as well as IBM experts as guest lecturers. This partnership will impact nearly 4,000 students every year (from the fourth year onwards)

The programs that will be offered for the academic year 2014-15 include: MBA, MSc-IT, BCA (information systems management), B.Com. (Hons.), Bachelor of business studies (BBS in Commerce, IT & Management). Other courses to be offered in a phased manner are B.Tech. (CSE/IT), M.Tech. (CSE/IT), integrated B.Tech.(CSE/IT) + MBA, MCA, to name a few.