Date:13/02/2006 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2006/02/13/stories/2006021305530600.htm

Tamil Nadu

IT sector faced with a huge talent crunch

Vani Doraisamy

India cannot supply enough talent for further IT growth, if industry and academia fail to address training issues

India's IT industry may be the flavour of global off-shoring but that does not necessarily mean it matches talent with the best in the world. The chunk of the industry is still dominated by the low-end BPO/ITES sector and, it is no mean irony that even this is now falling short of available talent, if the latest NASSCOM report is any indication.

Highlighting the below-par quality of many graduating engineers, the report forecasts a huge talent crunch in the sector in the next decade or so, despite job generation itself peaking.

How does the industry itself try to cope with what S. Ramadorai, CEO of Tata Consultancy Services, called the ``mismatch between availability and suitability''? A short survey done by The Hindu Educationplus on the basis of questionnaires sent to IT job providers and talent hunt/recruitment firms, provided interesting answers.

Not surprisingly, skewered HR priorities — most often ending with the numbers game getting the upper hand over quality — seem to be playing spoilsport in the recruitments game.

According to Bhaskar Das, vice-president, Human Resources, Cognizant Technology Solutions, top-tier companies do not face much of a problem as they are after the top percentile of the talent pool. In calendar year 2005, Cognizant recruited about 8,500 professionals, of which approximately 65 per cent was from the campuses. While there was no deterioration in the quality of education in leading universities and colleges, it was the increasing number of students coming out of newly sprung self-financing engineering colleges that contributed to non-employability or under-employability.

"Our experience has been that the first 12 years of formal schooling is more important than the four years of higher education,'' Mr. Das says, adding that industry-academia participation could solve this problem to a great extent. Such partnerships enable academic institutions get abreast of the latest trends in the industry.

Highly demanding

Not just suitability, even the competence of available talent needs to be critically examined, says Bala J. Raman, co-founder and president, Congruent Solutions: "Not all graduates in a certain discipline can cope with the highly demanding standards in export-oriented services organisations. A `supplemental training' system — which would be in conjunction with the current education system but having its own initiative and acting in collaboration with specific institutions — can get the students better prepared and trained in those areas that are relevant to the business.''

This supplemental model is likely to be far easier to implement and the `acceptance' of such a model among the student community is likely to be far higher. And then there is the HR factor: "Most of the recruitments in the industry are randomly done and the HR folks cannot be faulted for that. Due to the inherent uncertainty of the sales pipeline, the HR department is not able to forecast the talent requirement with adequate accuracy. Once this pressure is there, the HR professionals are measured on their `speed of recruitment' and that results in caution, quality and ethical practices being put on the back burner,'' says Mr. Raman.

Adds Vijayalakshmi Rao, COO and director of the Chennai-based Scope e-Knowledge Center: "Recruitment records in Scope indicate that out of every 20 engineers who apply for an entry level position, only five are found employable and finally one gets selected. In certain specialised areas like research, where we take MBAs from second/third rung institutes, the ratios are worse." And the compromises can really hurt: "Though technically okay, most of our engineers are not good enough when it comes to communication skills and presentation. This is imperative in an IT or ITES environment where an employee has to play a team leader role or interact with clients very early in his/her career. So, an organisation is forced to make a trade-off between looking for an ideal candidate versus taking someone who requires extensive training.''

The message is clear in terms of IT placements: if recruitment is done right, half the battle is won. To this end, academia-industry partnerships would prove mutually beneficial as the former needs to get a better perspective of what industry is looking for, and industry can contribute through application-oriented/practical training and inputs.