The animation, visual effects, gaming and comics (AVGC) industry is currently booming in India with one of the highest growth rates in the world. This fact was recently underlined in the 2022 Budget by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, who proposed an industry task force to help India serve both domestic growth and global demand.
The number of gamers in India has risen to more than 400 million, from 250 million in 2018-19, according to the KPMG 2021 report. This incredible growth has created tremendous opportunities as new sources of value have been unlocked in AVGC Industry. But it also poses a major challenge in terms of the existing skills gap in this sector that could potentially slow growth in the next five years.
The solution to this looming skills gap is to provide students with targeted short-term creative technology courses of an international standard. This ensures that new students can quickly receive world-class training and existing manpower can be upskilled to meet the new challenges faced by the AVGC industry, such as the advent of virtual manufacturing or the development of the Metaverse.
Short courses to fill skills gaps
The next question is what and where are these new jobs in the AVGC sector and where is the skills gap? The answer to this is quite complex, as there are over 20 different job descriptions per segment in the AVGC industry that require varying skills. For example, some of the job descriptions in the game industry include level designer, narrative designer, technical artist, game developer, programmer, game tester, sound designer, modellers, animators, and concept artist.
While some of these jobs require skills that take a long time to nurture and are best tackled in traditional institutes with four-year undergraduate courses, most of the problems with the skills gap lie in roles as technical artist or level designers, which are easily trained. in new creative technologies in much shorter courses, usually less than a year.
Currently, there are also as many as 7.7 lakh students who drop out of the regular undergraduate college courses in India every year. Many of these students do not receive a workable education. Short courses in topics such as animation, visual effects, game design, and virtual production can help these students up-skill for jobs in the AVGC industry that is exploding.
There is an urgent need to ensure that the Gen-Z of India get paid employment in activities they naturally love and enjoy. With over 400 million gamers in India, it is obvious that young people love to play games on mobile phones, PCs and consoles. If even a small percentage of these young people can be trained to create what they love to consume, India’s AVGC industry can easily solve the skills gap problem.
As the youth turn to new and different forms of communication and the increasing gamification of our daily lives, it has become imperative that our traditions and stories are also told in a format and medium that appeal to the new generation. As seen in films like Bahubali, Magadheera and director S Rajamouli’s upcoming RRR, Indian stories retold with high quality visual effects can be very successful with both an Indian and an international audience.
If we can effectively train our youth in the creative technologies of tomorrow and bridge the current skills gap in the AVGC sector, India can become a force to be reckoned with in international digital content creation, surpassing countries like China and creating a new revolution, such as the IT revolution of the 1990s that helped today’s India as a dominant force in the world.
— Written by CB Arun Kumar, Academic Director, EDGE by Pearl Academy, National Award Winner for Animation and a veteran of the AVGC industry
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