Even though in the last one year a number of private initiatives have been taken to fill up the void in the telecom training and education sector, most efforts have been confined to long-term full-time courses with not much focus on the immediate industry needs. Short-term courses catering to the immediate need of service providers have remained a rare phenomenon. Given this, the initiative taken by the Delhi-based Academy of Telecom Management (www.academytele.com) (ATM) is laudable. It offers courses on basics of telecom technology and business, mobile technologies, C 7 signaling, marketing of telecom services, CRM, policy and regulations, fiber optic communications, etc. Overall, by focusing on telecom operators, ATM course modules are a mix of technology, management and policy. The duration of most of these courses is not more than 3-4 days. The academy is also planning to launch a distance-learning program in the middle of 2002.

With an experienced faculty drawn from the industry itself, ATM courses are open to corporates as well as individual students. Training modules are usually designed and customized to meet the specific needs. Though as of now, ATM is more engaged in corporate training programs for major Indian service providers, it is open to the idea of training fresh engineers or MBAs, provided 15-20 of them get together and approach ATM.

What is good about the academy is that it has tied up with the Centre for Tele-Information (Technical University of Denmark) and has the telecom guru Prof Jagdish N Seth on its advisory committee. Moreover, it has also the backing of all the major telecom industry associations like ABTO, COAI and ISPAI as also the leading equipment vendors like Alcatel. "We would like ATM to become the Centre for Tele-Information of South Asia,’’ says a senior telecom professional associated with ATM. For the uninitiated, the Denmark-based Centre for Tele-Information is the leading center for training professionals, policy-makers and regulators in Europe.