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 underscored in the budget 2022 by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, who proposed a task force for the sector to help India serve both domestic growth and global demand.

The number of gamers in has India increased to over 400 million from 250 million in 2018-19, as per the KPMG 2021 report. This incredible growth has thrown up massive opportunities as new sources of value have been unlocked in AVGC Industry. But it also poses a major challenge in terms of the existing skill-gap in this sector that could potentially blunt its growth over the next five years.

The solution to this looming skill-gap crisis is to provide students with focused short-term creative technology courses of an international standard. This will ensure world-class training can be imparted quickly to fresh students and existing manpower can be upskilled to tackle the new challenges faced by the AVGC industry like the advent of virtual production or the development of the Metaverse.

Short Courses to Fill Skill Gap

The next question is what and where are these new job opportunities in the AVGC sector and where is the skill-gap? The answer to this is rather complex as there are over 20 distinct job descriptions per segment in the AVGC Industry which require diverse skill sets. For example, some of the job descriptions in the gaming industry are level designer, narrative designer, technical artist, game developer, programmer, game tester, sound designer, modelers, animators, and concept artist.

While some of these jobs require skills take a long time to nurture and are best tackled in traditional institutes with four-year undergraduate courses, most of the skill-gap problems lie in roles like technical artist or level designers which can easily be trained in new creative technologies in a much shorter courses, typically under one year in duration.

Currently there are also as many as 7.7 lakh students passing out of regular undergraduate college courses in India every year. Many of these students do not gain an employable education. Short term courses in subjects like animation, visual effects, game design and virtual production can help upskilling these students to employable careers in the AVGC Industry which is exploding.

There is a pressing need to ensure that the Gen-Z of India are gainfully employed in activities that they naturally love and enjoy. With a 400 million plus gamer base in India it is extremely clear that the youth enjoy gaming on mobiles, PCs, and consoles. If even a small percentage of these youth can be trained to create what they love to consume, the Indian AVGC industry can easily solve its skill gap problem.

With the youth turning to new and different modes of communication and the increasing gamification of our daily existence, it has become imperative that our traditions and stories are also retold in a format and medium that appeals to the new generation. As seen in films like Bahubali, Magadheera and the upcoming RRR by director S Rajamouli, Indian tales retold 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 to reckon with in the International Digital Content Creation space, surpassing countries like China and power another revolution, like the IT revolution of the 1990s that helped power the India of today as a dominant force in the world.

— Authored by CB Arun Kumar, Academic Director, EDGE by Pearl Academy, National Award winner for animation and an AVGC sector veteran

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