Running Out Of Knowledge Workers
The Hindustan Times reports:
India contributes 28 per cent to the total talent pool of knowledge workers in the world. This has helped it corner 65 per cent of the information technology business and 46 per cent of the ITES market. But the greatest challenge staring the software services exports in the face is skill shortage. The country will face a shortage of 500,000 knowledge workers by 2010. The IT services sector will need 150,000 employees while the BPO sector will need 350,000 trained personnel.
According to Nasscom-McKinsey Report 2005, the problem is more of suitability than of availability of labour since India is at the right side of demographic divide. According to the report 2005, “The country will need 2.3 million professionals to meet the $60 billion export revenue target by then. But the present education system will be able to churn out only 7,00,000.
“The country needs to do with higher education what it did with telecom. Deregulate the sector so that some universities are given a deemed university status, allow flexibility in curriculum, funding, and teachers salaries,” says McKinsey & Co partner Noshir Kaka.
Quite. As I’d mentioned here, our strengths are much more suited to labour-intensive manufacture than services exports, and our resources in the latter sector are already being stretched. And Kaka is bang on about the need to reform our education system. More on that some other time.
Thoughts?
Well i guess this situation would also provide an opportunity both politically, economically and socially to interact with Pakistan and tap the talent pool there.
I believe Wipro or one of the major IT company of India has signed an MoU with one of the pakistani companies in this regard.
Comment by Ajit Mukherjee — December 14, 2005 @ 2:16 am
I think its time the industry took some of the blame too. I have seen specific branches (in engg.) being created on industry demand - but the industry not giving enough fillip to it, or worse, ignoring the field specifically created on its demand(in terms of recruitment of course).
The gap can be bridged if the industry puts in enough effort - and its money where its mouth is.
Comment by Prasanna — December 14, 2005 @ 4:12 pm
I think it is problem of quantity and more importantly quality. And out education system needs a complete overhoul to make our resource have edge over every other country.
Comment by Vishal — December 14, 2005 @ 5:00 pm
I was under the impression that is not enough demand and a high supply. For example the one million applications for 10,000 jobs at Infosys. I don’t know exactly what level of educational ability was necessary for the positions, but still seems there is not enough jobs to go around. I could be wrong though.
Comment by AK — December 15, 2005 @ 3:18 am
The government is meddling with private higher education in the form of caste based reservations. So, the supply will be affected because the private sector educationists will be discouraged by the government intervention. May be, the knowledge worker jobs will move to China where things seem to be merit based.
Comment by sv — December 16, 2005 @ 12:08 pm