40% of IT professionals in national database

Top IT firms, including Tata Consultancy Services, Accenture, Satyam, Wipro, Cognizant "� accounting 40 per cent of the total IT and IT-enabled Services (IteS) workforce "� have joined the national skills registry (NSR).

The registry is a pathbreaking initiative by the National Association for Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) to build database of employees in the IT sector.

"Even though the work on the database is in preliminary stage, we have received information from around 40 per cent of the total IT workforce. This is a major achievement towards making the sector an organised sector, more so in the wake of the recent data theft in the industry," said a senior executive of National Securities Depository Ltd (NSDL).

NSDL is mandated with the task of setting up the skills registry by Nasscom.

In the wake of the incidents such as data theft and impersonalisation, NSR would keep a hawkish eye on miscreants. It would also facilitate a candidate's background check at the time of recruitment.

"The IT industry feels there will be overall cost savings. This would also provide credibility to the professionals in the database," the official said.

According to him, the database is being structured in such a way that the employees will have a say on the use of the database.

"At present, it will be available only with the employer. However, if the employee wants to apply for a new job, he or she has to authorise us to make the data available to whoever he or she has applied to," the NSDL official added.

BPO majors such as Accenture, Genpact, ICICI OneSource, 24/7 Customer, e-Serve International, WNS, Scope International, Wipro BPO; and IT firms including NIIT SmartServe, Fusion Technologies, Deutsche Network Services, Zensar Technologies, Tech Mahindra, Perot Systems and NeST are among the others in the list.