(Post 11/02/2006) Hiện nay có hơn 200 trung tâm Aptech mở tại 57 thành phố của Trung quốc, chia xẻ 15% thị phần thị trường đào tạo này, góp phần giải quyết nhu cầu nhân lực 800.000 nguời trong 3 năm tới – trong khi các trường đại học của Trung quốc chỉ có khả năng cung cấp 62.000 kỹ sư CNTT/năm. Aptech đã tiếp cận thị trường đào tạo CNTT tại Trung quốc và thành công như thế nào…

Pallavi Aiyar on how Aptech took IT education to China and made a huge success of it.

Rows of desks, slightly worse for wear; bespectacled, Powerpoint-wielding teacher, and a couple of dozen students rustling their way through a weighty book… This could be a classroom of the hundreds of training cen-tres that dot the Haidian district in northwest Beijing, home to a majori-ty the city’s universities. But a clos-er look reveals that next to the colour-ful characters for Beida Qing Niao (lit-erally, Beijing University, Jade Bird) at entrance to the school are the English letters APTECH: six letters that represent excellence in IT train-ing across the Chinese mainland.

The Haidian centre is the first, and largest, of the over 200 training schools that Aptech has established in 57 different Chinese cities since enter-ing the mainland in 2000. Known by its joint venture with the Jade Bird group, an affiliate of the prestigious Beijing University, the company has maintained the top slot in the IT train-ing market in China for four consec-utive years. According to the China Centre for Information Industry Develop-ment, Aptech Beida Jade Bird captured around 19 per cent of the country’s IT training market in 2005, up from 14.8 per cent in 2004.

The popularity of the Aptech Beida brand is evident at the Haidian centre, where about 2,000 students, all between 18 and 30, have enrolled for one of two courses: a two-year ACCP software engineering degree and a one-year BNet diploma that focuses on network administrator skills. While most of the students are college grad-uates, many enrol directly after finish- ing high school. Fashionably dressed in leather jackets, smoking cigarettes during their breaks with insouciance, the students are the icons of a new China. Opportunities are greater than ever before, but the competition too is stronger. Lou Bin, a graduate in com-puter science from Hunan University, worked for a year at Lenovo, China’s premier IT company, before realising that he needed “extra training, more up-to-date skills” than he had picked up at the university to really help him on the job. Lou asked around and was told by colleagues that Aptech Beida was his best bet.

“We focus on combining theory with practice here and are aware that our students are very career-oriented,” says Chen Li, an instructor at the Haidian centre. She stresses that the skills taught at the centre are cutting-edge, with the course material being revised every 18 months. “Aptech’s Indian connection is also an advantage and gives us credibility. In China, peo-ple know of Silicon Valley but they also know of Bangalore!” says Chen

Laxman Hemnani, Aptech Beida’s Vice-General Manager, is jus-tifiably proud of what they have achieved since the company first came to China. “The best thing we did was decide to go for a joint venture,” he declares. Given that China is a “very specialised market”, he feels that Aptech would have been lost on its own. “Aptech might be a household name in India. But in China, it would have taken time to build awareness about us.” Beida (as Beijing universi-ty is known), however, is one of the most powerful brands in China. “It’s every student’s dream just to have their photo taken inside the campus,” says Hemnani.

The key to Aptech’s success in China is ‘localisation’: it decided early to take the course material beyond ‘what’ to ‘how’

Ask him about the most impor-tant reason for Aptech’s China suc-cess and Hemnani is unequivocal: localisation. He says that success only came Aptech’s way once it realised that it was not enough to simply translate the teaching and course material into Mandarin. They, in fact, needed to be rewritten and adapted to the Chinese situation. Thus, he says, that while in India you need to tell the instructors “what to do”; in China you need to tell them “how to do it”.

“The exact steps of every process have to be spelt out,” he says. Moreover, given that Chinese students are less exposed to western practices, their coding styles and presentation tech-niques too tend to be different from those of Indian students.

If industry forecasts are to be believed, there will be a demand for around 800,000 new software profes-sionals in China in the next three to four years. This is a glaring gap when compared to the 62,000 computer engineering graduates coming out of Chinese universities every year. Not surprisingly, the IT education retail market in the country is forecast to grow between 17 and 19 per cent annually till 2010, according to market intelligence firm IDC. In 2004, Aptech Beida’s revenues increased by 70 per cent over the previous year, to touch $40 million. “This is definitely a big growth market for us,” says Hemnani contentedly.

Theo The Indian Express, 1/1/2006