| Large companies in sunrise sectors such as IT/ITeS | | | | "happy accident". This is because not many are aware |
| and retail have shown the way in investing in training | | | | of the field and those who do are not adequately |
| and academic interventions to feed their huge | | | | trained. So, this start-up today has a parallel training |
| manpower requirement. Now, much smaller and niche | | | | school that has so far trained over 500 technical |
| players are not hesitating to replicate the model as | | | | writers who have joined the likes of Infosys and Wipro |
| industry-ready talent is getting scarce. Minnows are | | | | apart from TWB itself. There would be a need for |
| investing in creating third-party training facilities to feed | | | | 50,000 technical writers in the country over the next |
| their own requirements and also convert their idle | | | | five years, he says. |
| assets (machines and manpower) into a revenue | | | | A similar story is at play at Teleradiology Solutions, |
| stream. | | | | which reads MRI and CT scans of patients in the US |
| Behind this trend is not just an economy growing at | | | | at 30% lower cost. The Bangalore-based company, |
| 8-9 % a year, but also the structural shifts that | | | | which dishes out medical reports in half an hour to |
| demand new sets of skills the current education | | | | manpower-strapped hospitals in the US and Singapore, |
| system is not geared to meet. It is this skill void that is | | | | is training radiologists and doctors in the art of reading |
| compelling even rank start-ups to put on the coach's | | | | these images. Again, the driver is captive need, which |
| hat, industry observers say. The start-up world is full of | | | | has been spun off into a revenue stream. |
| such examples such as The Writers' Block, | | | | Says founder Dr Sunita Maheshwari: "There are only |
| Teleradiology Solutions, Comat and TutorVista. And | | | | 10,000 radiologists in India while the number in the US is |
| these could just be tip of the iceberg. | | | | 25,000 for a population of 250 million." The company's |
| Rajesh Shukla, the founder of The Writers Block, a | | | | recently launched training school, Rad Gurukul, is |
| Bangalore-based documentation outsourcing company, | | | | targeted at medical personnel and healthcare |
| prefers to call the choice of a technical writer's job a | | | | technologists. |