Wednesday, October 18, 2006

More India Stuff - NYT "Skills Gap Hurts Technology Boom in India"

On October 14th I wrote about a proposed India/EU trade deal and said:

Currently India is going through an Economic boom driven in part by the low cost of labor.  However the cost of labor in India is rising, in China also

Well apparently that isn't the only problem in the Indian labor market.  Today's NY Times reports on a growing shortage of the engineers required to support India's Tech Industry boom. 

As its technology companies soar to the outsourcing skies, India is bumping up against an improbable challenge. In a country once regarded as a bottomless well of low-cost, ready-to-work, English-speaking engineers, a shortage looms.

India still produces plenty of engineers, nearly 400,000 a year at last count. But their competence has become the issue.[...]

I can't really comment personally on the quality of graduates of Indian Engineering schools, but I do know a number of engineers who believe that the quality of graduates have gone down.  Just a little heresy anecdotal evidence.

The labor crunch is starting to pop up across the service economy. ICICI, the country’s largest financial services company, announced plans to hire up to 40,000 workers in the next three years.  [...]

I haven't seen any articles but I am willing to bet that the same thing is happening in China.  I will look and see what I can find.

Most of the rest of the article is about companies efforts to address this issue with universities in India and is worth a read.  I think a number of American companies could take a hint from how Indian companies are responding.  Maybe Microsoft instead of bitching about needing more H1-B visa's every year should open its own college to train the workers it needs.

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