Growing the pie!

A billion people
1,346 engineering colleges*
439,689 engineers/ year *

Yet, no-where is the proverbial war for talent as intense as it is in India. India's top major competitive advantage continues to remain talented workforce, but as companies grow and expand their operations both within India and overseas, getting the ‘right’ talent is becoming increasingly difficult for companies. This is true of both campus hires as well as lateral hiring!

The catch here is the term ‘right’. So really, is there a dearth of talent? The figures show that 40% of students get rejected on analytical skills, 20-30% on soft skills, and another (ONLY) 10% on technical skills, which leaves us with an employability percentage of around 20-30%. Astonishing but true!

Major IT giants (eg. Infosys, TCS, Wipro, GE, etc) and even the smaller ones joining the bandwagon – who so far focused on hiring (even ‘poaching’), training, and retaining people are now forced to work on expanding the talent pool rather than just going for a larger slice of the pie. True, they do have their ulterior motives to achieve, like the availability of trained manpower, prospective users/buyers, etc, none-the-less, these can ONLY be achieved if the desired benefits percolate to the targeted community.

Campus Connect program run by Infosys is a testimonial of the company’s efforts “to build a sustainable partnership with engineering education institutions for mutual benefit”. It also aims at evolving a model through which Infosys and engineering institutions can partner for competitiveness, enhance the pool of highly capable talent for growth requirements in Information Technology (IT) space.

Another recent example is VI Mantra 2008, an annual technical paper contest announced by National Instruments to nurture Innovation and Creativity in engineering education. It is a national level platform for Students and Researchers that enables them to showcase their innovative, graphical system-based design applications to the Indian industry & academia.

Several other firms – infact most of them, whether big or small, have also come forward with varied initiatives to help increase India’s competitiveness in the knowledge economy by – (1) bridging the gap between the industry and academia (2) creating an effective means of backward integration into the supply chain. However, methinks, in conjunction with growing the pie, we should also concentrate on making these jobs more rewarding and lucrative to curb the eventual, inevitable ‘brain-drain’ in the long term!

*(Source: AICTE)

- Namrta Batra