As part of the IIT Madras curriculum, the TeNeT faculty regularly teach a wide variety of undergraduate and postgraduate courses in all the specialization's mentioned above. IIT Madras is recognized today as having an extremely high-quality program in communications and networking. The number of graduating students in these fields has more than doubled in the last few years. In addition, a very large number - close to 1,000 - engineers and technicians have been trained to become top-notch designers by working hands-on in the numerous projects undertaken by the TeNeT Group in the last decade.

However, the group has been seized of the issue of how to scale their efforts so as to at least partly fill the ever-increasing gap between the demand and supply of engineers in the Information Technology (IT) sector. It became clear that there are limits to increasing supply by simply scaling the size of the existing teaching institutions. On the other hand, the numerous engineering colleges that have come up in the last decade do graduate a large number of engineers, despite poor infrastructure and under-staffed faculty. These engineers have several gaps in their preparation, and the IT industry needs to impart significant additional training before they can begin to contribute.

Bearing this situation in mind, the TeNeT group has pioneered the concept of finishing schools. The first one to be set up, as a joint effort between IIT Madras and the Usha Martin Group, was the Usha-Martin Academy of Communication Technology (UACT). Over a period of three years, this institution ran three-month intensive programs throughout the year for fresh industry recruits in the areas of telecommunications and networking. The courses, which include nearly 50% laboratory content, were carefully designed by TeNeT faculty such that the gaps in the preparation of these fresh graduates are filled, and they are introduced to the latest concepts prevalent in the IT field. UACT has drawn on the resources of experts from all the IITs and other leading institutions in preparing the course material. UACT had the capacity to train about a thousand engineers each year for industry.

The second training center to be opened by the TeNeT Group was the Analog Devices-IITM DSP Learning Center, also at IIT Madras. This center is dedicated to training final year engineering students from engineering colleges, as well as industry personnel, in programming Digital Signal Processors. There is a severe shortage of engineers in the area of DSP programming, and most opt for other software avenues primarily due to lack of exposure and the mystique associated with DSP. The DSP Learning Center seeks to redress this lacuna. It runs its programs throughout the year and trains a few hundred students each year.

Building on these experiences, the TeNeT Group is now starting a multi-institutional finishing school that will use the Internet for delivery of live and recorded lectures.

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