The VW Group’s apprentice programme hopes to train candidates to fill up positions in car service. But in an industry starved of entry-level talent, it’s a long road ahead.
The Volkswagen Group inaugurated its seventh apprenticeship programme recently in the campus of the Hindustan Institute of Engineering Technology (HIET) in Padappai near Chennai. This is part of VW’s VG-TAP (Volkswagen Technical Apprenticeship Program) initiative which has seen the German brand tie up with educational institutions across the country to set up training labs, stocked with equipment supplied by VW. The courses aim to train students in their final year of the diploma in vehicle servicing. There are six other centres in India and the eighth centre was inaugurated in Bhubaneshwar the day after this interview was conducted.
The other six centres are at Pune, Mumbai, Kochi, Bangalore, Ahmedabad and Chandigarh. While the first centre was set up in Pune in February 2011, the one in Chandigarh is yet to become operational. At present, there are 152 students in these centres. VW aims to take this number up to 500 students at any given point in time by establishing 25 centres by the end of 2015.
These students undergo training at a VG-TAP centre for an entire year, one month of which will be spent in local VW, Audi or Skoda dealerships gaining first-hand experience. “After the programme, I hope they will join one of our dealerships as a service technician,” says Dietmar Hildebrandt, director, group service, Volkswagen.
Jetta, set, go
All the civil work for the centre in Chennai was taken care of by HIET, while VW supplied engines, gearboxes, measurement tools and diagnostic tools for the students to train. VW has also donated a Jetta to the lab for the students to get “hands-on training.” The students will be trained by two trainers who are certified by VW. Professors Subramanium and Rudramurthy of HIET have undergone a month-long training programme at the VW training centre in Pune and certified to that effect.
The trainers are in charge of training a batch of 15 students for an hour everyday on the nuances of vehicle servicing. Thirty of the 110 students in their third year of the automobile technology diploma attended the preliminary tests held by officials from VW, out of which 15 were shortlisted for the year-long training programme.
Hildebrandt mentions that these students can be absorbed by any dealership in any brand that comes under the VW umbrella. Further, he says, “At the moment, we will not be tying up with any other colleges in Tamil Nadu, but we are looking at tying up with ITIs in the future.”
Such tie-ups are crucial to develop the labour workforce believes S Ramakrishnan, a management consultant who provides both white-collared and blue-collared workers to various companies. Ramakrishnan is the founder-director of Kriya Management Consultants, a company that has been in operation for 16 years. Asked about the labour shortage issues, he paints a rather grim picture. “There are literally no new CNC operators and welders in Tamil Nadu,” he says. When companies want to hire candidates for these jobs, they have to either bring them in from other states or simply poach from competitors.
“The reason is simple. Gujarat and Pune have become a more attractive option for them. Likewise, companies from Singapore and Taiwan hold walk-in interviews and hire 200-250 workers at one go,” he says. The practice of Singapore-based companies flying down to Chennai to hire workers in such numbers began just when they were recovering from the slump in 2008.
Ramakrishnan is cautious to add that the VW project is a “skill-building exercise.” He adds, “There needs to be several more tie-ups and programmes for it to make a marked difference in the labour shortage-skill level conundrum.” He also says that it is a tough task to gauge what the exact requirement is when it comes to shopfloor workers. “A company of the scale of Wheels India hires around 250-300 ITI students as part of its floating workforce every year,” he adds.
It is not only at the shopfloor level that Ramakrishnan sees major problems. “Very few graduates from good colleges like IITs and NITs join the manufacturing industry. They don’t see the job as something glamorous and the pay isn’t as high as that offered in an FMCG or IT company,” he says. In fact, there is a marked shortage in methods engineers, process engineers, R&D engineers and design engineers. “There is a lot of poaching going on, much more than in other industries,” he says.
KARTHIK H