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The rapid growth in the IT and BPO industry is expected to lead to a shortage of manpower in the coming years. Currently only 50 per cent of the engineering graduates in the country are employable. If the top IT companies continue to grow at the current pace they will absorb all of this. Experts argue that the government should take steps to improve the existing education infrastructure in the country. The spectre of a severe shortage of knowledge workers in the IT and ITES sectors by 2010 is hanging over the country like the sword of Damocles. While demographics clearly weigh in the country's favour, quality of the workforce does not. Not only has India established itself as the leading offshore destination for IT and BPO services over the last decade, but it is also gearing up to grow its offshore IT and BPO industries at an annual rate greater than 25 per cent. And generate export revenues to the tune of $60 billion by 2010. But all is not well on the manpower front, which is the single most important determinant in India's dream run to achieve the targeted export revenues in a five-year time frame. Although, India contributes a significant 28 per cent to the total talent pool of knowledge workers globally, it will be besieged with a severe skill shortage of 5,00,000 knowledge workers by 2010. The problem is more of suitability than of availability of labour. The industry is currently using a multi-pronged approach to address the shortage of skilled manpower. It is hiring specialist expatriate talent, recruiting freshers and training them. Some industry experts articulate that creating certain focussed knowledge zones, as it is more a problem of quality and not of numbers, can combat the problem of skill-set shortage. But India will need 10-12 integrated knowledge cities in the next five years to tackle problems of infrastructure in order to match targets. The IT/BPO Industries, in the meanwhile, have not been complacently resting on their laurels. Many companies in the two sectors are proactively tying up with academic institutions to cater to their burgeoning manpower shortage requirements. And now the collaboration with academia is gaining further significance in case of networking, as it is a niche and specific industry with very few academic institutions offering networking certification of their own. Establishing strong partnerships with key academia will help infuse software integration and real-time business into education to ensure that skills match market demand to create innovative solutions for years to come. In addition to collaborating with academia,
the IT/BPO sectors are also coming up with extremely creative strategies
to grapple with the manpower shortage problem. Many mid-sized companies
are finding creative ways to overcome the shortage of talent by looking at
hiring expatriate talent with minimal experience of one or two years. While the Industry is going all out to train IT professionals and university graduates, there seems to be a dearth of Industry-specific HR talent to tackle the manpower needs of the sector. The HR professionals being churned out today are more geared to address the requirements of the brick and mortar companies and have very little understanding of what the IT and BPO sectors need. According to a Nasscom estimate, there are a total of one million people in the IT/ITES sector today, which is expected to grow five times in the next 6-7 year time frame. Therefore, the requirement for a futuristic pool of HR professionals, relevant to the needs of the industry becomes more acute. With corporates going all out to address the manpower shortage, action has certainly been precipitated in the right direction. While analysts are pessimistic about overcoming the serious manpower shortage, there are many who believe that collaborating with academia is the answer.
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