The Animation, Visual Effects, Gaming and Comics (AVGC) industry is currently booming in India with the highest growth rate in the world. This fact was recently highlighted in the Budget for 2022 by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, who proposed a task force for the sector to help India meet both domestic growth and global demand.
As per the KPMG 2021 report, the number of gamers in India has increased from 250 million in 2018-19 to 400 million. This incredible growth has led to massive opportunities as new sources of value have opened up in the AVGC industry. But it also poses a major challenge in the context of the existing skill-gap in the sector that could potentially affect its growth over the next five years.
The solution to this emerging skill-gap crisis is to provide students with an internationally focused short-term creative technology course. This will ensure that world-class training can be provided to new students quickly and existing manpower can be prepared to tackle the new challenges facing the AVGC industry, such as virtual production or development of the metaverse.
Short courses to fill the skill gap
The next question is, what are and where are these new job opportunities in AVGC sector and where is the skill gap? The answer is rather complicated as there are over 20 specific job descriptions per segment in the AVGC industry that require diverse skill sets. For example, some job descriptions in the gaming industry are level designer, narrative designer, technical artist, game developer, programmer, game tester, sound designer, modeler, animator, and concept artist.
While some of these jobs require skills that take a long time to nurture and are best dealt with at traditional institutions with four-year undergraduate courses, most skill-gap problems are of the technical artist or level. Designers who can easily be trained in new creative technologies in very short courses, usually less than a year in duration.
Presently around 7.7 lakh students pass out from regular undergraduate college courses every year in India. Many of these students do not receive employable education. Short term courses in subjects such as Animation, Visual Effects, Game Design and Virtual Production can help these students to build employable careers in the AVGC industry which is exploding.
There is an overwhelming need to ensure that Gen-Zs of India are gainfully employed in activities they naturally love and enjoy. With a gamer base of over 400 million in India, it is quite evident that the youth enjoy gaming on mobiles, PCs and consoles. If even a small percentage of these youth can be trained to make what they love to consume, the Indian AVGC industry can easily solve their skill gap problem.
With youth turning to new and different modes of communication and increasing simplification of our daily existence, it has become imperative that our traditions and stories are also re-told in a format and medium that will appeal to the new generation. . As seen by director S Rajamouli in films such as Baahubali, Magadheera and the upcoming RRR, Indian stories retelling with high quality visual effects can be very successful with both Indian and international audiences.
If we can effectively train our youth in the creative technologies of tomorrow and bridge the current skill-gap in the AVGC sector, India can become a force in the international digital content creation sector, leaving behind countries like China And may power another revolution. Like the IT revolution of the 1990s that helped power today’s India as a major power in the world.
– Written by CB Arun Kumar, Academic Director, EDGE by Pearl Academy, National Award winner for Animation and AVGC field veteran
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