PTC to take its education programme into Tamil Nadu schools 'full-blast' : Dr Barry F. Cohen

Bangalore: PTC is all set to take it's education programme to the Tamil Nadu schools in a big way, targeting the Government Schools, Private Schools, Vocational institutes and Engineering colleges. This initiative is likely to be executed in a partnership mode - between PTC, CII, TVS and the educational institutions in the state.

Excited about this opportunity, Dr Barry F. Cohen, Executive Vice President, Parametric Technology Corporation said that PTC is investing in the Indian education community and had already trained 8300 teachers in India.

The company is also understood to have initiated talks with the Karnataka government in order to take forward it's education initiative in the state.

"In our education programme, we give away free software, curriculum, assessments, online teacher training. We provide online training to children in their middle-schools or secondary-schools," said Dr. Cohen.

"We call this programme the 'Engineer of the Future'. We believe that, by exposing more and more children to the possibility of an engineering career, over time as they go through education, they actually are more productive members of industry. The Industry has an opportunity to get students that are actually trained on the kind of technology that they may use on the job."

"So we don't have the sort of gap between the academic institutions and the industry, where the industry has to feel the need to retrain the students when they come into work," added Dr. Cohen.

Venu Srinivasan, President, Confederation of Indian Industry emphasised the importance of vocational training to produce skilled workforce. Given our excellent human resource capabilities, we need to examine the opportunities for us in amalgamating manufacturing talents with India’s considerable talents in design, science and technology, innovation, and engineering.

John D. Stuart, Senior VP Global Education Program - PTC said that PTC's 'Engineers of the future' program, would be specifically attractive to female students, under-represented minorities and children in rural areas.

From 'Made in India' to 'Made by India'

"When we come to manufacturing - manufacturing will thrive and remain in a particular country only if the design and the control also remains in the country," stated Venu Srinivasan.

Prof Lord Kumar Bhattacharyya, Director and Founder, Warwick Manufacturing Group, UK said that owing to lack of design and innovation investments by Indian manufacturing sector, there are very few globally known products of Indian origin. Speaking on the trends of product development, Prof Lord Bhattacharyya emphasised how globally regulatory and legislative measures by government was leading to huge investments in design innovation by companies worldwide.

Speaking on the success stories of companies in deploying global product development solutions, Dr. Cohen said that design and innovation are fundamentally linked and successful companies are capitalising through continuous innovation in a rapid pace to gain the first mover advantage. Dr. Cohen greatly emphasised the profound implication of knowledge management and web based social networking services on product development. Market leadership is a function of continuously capturing new sources of innovation.

"Students in schools may learn a lot about reading and writing but they don't necessarily use some of the visual capacity they have, that engineering calls for. So when you train students in engineering skills, who were behind in some of their own academic programmes, you are actually re-engaging them in the education process because they find they are ready, in some way to use engineering technology," explained Dr. Cohen.

© CAD CAM News 2009 All rights reserved