Posted on 04/07/2007 9:05:17 AM PDT by nwrep
At the heart of the sprawling corporate campus, in a hilltop building overlooking the immaculately shorn lawns, the sports fields and the hypermodern theater complex, young engineers crowd into a classroom. They are India's best and brightest, with stellar grades that launched them into a high-tech industry growing at more than 25 percent annually. And their topic of the day? Basic telephone skills.
"Hello?" one young man says nervously, holding his hand to his ear like a phone. "Hello? I'd like to leave a message for Number 17. Can I do that?"
Nearly two decades into India's phenomenal growth as an international center for high technology, the industry has a problem: It's running out of workers.
There may be a lot of potential — Indian schools churn out 400,000 new engineers, the core of the high-tech industry, every year — but as few as 100,000 are actually ready to join the job world, experts say.
Instead, graduates are leaving universities that are mired in theory classes, and sometimes so poorly funded they don't have computer labs. Even students from the best colleges can be dulled by cram schools and left without the most basic communication skills, according to industry leaders.
So the country's voracious high-tech companies, desperate for ever-increasing numbers of staffers to fill their ranks, have to go hunting.
"The problem is not a shortage of people," said Mohandas Pai, human resources chief for Infosys Technologies, the software giant that built and runs the Mysore campus for its new employees. "It's a shortage of trained people."
From the outside, this nation of 1.03 billion, with its immense English-speaking population, may appear to have a bottomless supply of cheap workers with enough education to claim more outsourced Western jobs.
But things look far different in India, where technology companies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars in a frantic attempt to ensure their profit-making machine keeps producing.
"This is really the Achilles heel of the industry," said James Friedman, an analyst with Susquehanna Financial Group, an investment firm based in Bala Cynwyd, Pa., who has studied the issue.
"When we first started covering the industry, in 2000, there were maybe 50,000 jobs and 500,000 applicants," he said. Now there are perhaps 180,000 annual openings, but only between 100,000 and 200,000 qualified candidates.
For now, industry is keeping up, but only barely. A powerful trade group, the National Association of Software Services Companies, or NASSCOM, estimates a potential shortfall of 500,000 technology professionals by 2010.
On the most basic level, it's a problem of success. The high-tech industry is expanding so fast that the population can't keep up with the demand for high-end workers.
Tata Consultancy Services, for instance, India's largest software company, hires around 3,000 people a month. The consulting firm Accenture plans to hire 8,000 in the next six months and IBM says it will bring on more than 50,000 additional people in India by 2010.
A shortage means something feared here: higher wages.
Much of India's success rests on the fact that its legions of software programmers work for far less than those in the West — often for one-fourth the salary. If industry can't find enough workers to keep wages low, the companies that look to India for things like software development will turn to competitors, from Poland to the Philippines, and the entire industry could stumble.
The responses range from private "finishing schools" polishing the computer skills of new graduates to multimillion-dollar partnerships spanning business, government and higher education. The biggest companies have built elaborate training centers. The Mysore campus, for instance, was little more than scrub-filled fields when Infosys, India's second-largest software firm, based in the nearby technology hub of Bangalore, began building here in earnest three years ago.
In America, the campus would be nothing unusual. But in India — with its electricity outages, poverty and mountains of garbage — the walled-in corporate fantasyland, watched over by armed guards, is anything but normal.
It has 120 faculty members, more than 80 buildings, 2,350 hostel rooms and a 500,000-square-foot education complex. There's a movie complex built inside a geodesic dome. An army of workers sweeps the already-spotless streets and trims the already-perfect lawns.
Month by month, it's getting bigger. Today, some 4,500 students at a time attend the 16-week course for new employees. By September, there will be space for 13,000.
Infosys spent $350 million on the campus, and will spend $140 million this year on training, said Pai, the human resources chief.
"This is the enormous cost we have to pay to ensure we have enough people," he said.
They're not the only ones.
IBM's technical skills programs reached well over 100,000 Indians last year, from children to university professors. At Tata Consultancy Services, measures range from a talent search as far afield as Uruguay to having executives teach university classes — all designed simply to make people employable.
Most industry leaders believe these investments will pay off, and India will remain competitive. But most are also guarded in their optimism.
"We should be able to get through this year, but if we don't get things like finishing schools into place we'll see an actual shortage," said Kiran Karnik, the NASSCOM chairman.
Much of the problem is rooted in a deeply flawed school system.
As India's economy blossomed over 15 years, spawning a middle class desperate to push their children further up the economic ladder, the higher education system grew dramatically. The number of engineering colleges, for instance, has nearly tripled.
But the problems have simply grown worse.
India has technical institutes that seldom have electricity, and colleges with no computers. There are universities where professors seldom show up. Textbooks can be decades old.
Even at the best schools — and the government-run Indian Institutes of Technology are among the world's most competitive, with top-level professors and elaborate facilities — there are problems.
The brutal competition to get into these universities means ambitious students can spend a year or more in private cram schools, giving up everything to study full-time for the entrance exams.
Instruction is by rote learning, and only test scores count.
"Everything else is forgotten: the capacity to think, to write, to be logical, to get along with people," Pai said. The result is smart, well-educated people who can have trouble with such professional basics as working on a team or good phone manners.
"The focus," he said, "is cram, cram, cram, cram."
Things are different at the Infosys campus.
"The premier concern in college was to get maximum marks," said Sanjay Joshi, a 22-year-old engineer midway through Infosys' training course. "Here, the focus is totally on learning."
Much of that learning is technical, mostly focusing on programming. But "soft skills" classes, as they're called, also include such things as e-mail etiquette and problem-solving.
Then there are off-hours. The average age on campus is 22 and for some of them it's their first time away from home. There's a soccer field, a cricket field, a swimming pool with a juice bar, a bowling alley and a gym. There are racks of bicycles to ride.
You could drown in politeness. "Ride Carefully" a sign warns bicyclists at a gentle curve in the road; "Enjoy your visit," a passing student tells a visitor.
Everywhere, there are well-groomed, well-mannered young people.
On a recent morning, students filed into a large classroom for a programming course.
By 8:45 a.m. — 15 minutes before class began — the room was nearly full. Row after row of students sat quietly, waiting for the teacher.
los angeles liberals have produced a new
slave class
of illiterates.
Good American engineers and IT people are like diamonds. There is no shortage at all in this country. You just might not like what you have to pay to get one.
well, sure!
there are >some< americans, still,
that discipline and educate their kids.
and these kids are competitive and seek the better universities. and they excel.
no question about that.
i worry about the others—the illiterates that i see daily in socal.
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/CareerManagement/story?id=2582776&page=1&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312
‘Cover Letters from Hell’ Expose Poor Quality of College Grads
By KATE KLONICK
Oct. 19, 2006 — If recent college graduates apply for a job at Killian Advertising in Chicago, they’d better mind their grammar, spelling and punctuation — not to mention their sentence structure, syntax and diction — lest they end up in the company’s “Cover Letters From Hell” that it posts on its Web site.
Six years ago, Bob Killian, owner and founder of the agency, began posting anonymous excerpts from poorly written cover letters he received from those asking for employment.
The World’s Worst Cover Letters
http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=2582846
The mistakes ranged from unfortunate omissions (”I am seeking a new position as i have recently been laid” and “I also have a degree English which serves me well in editing text for poor grammer or typos”) to nonsense sentences and topics (”It is through the innovational process, as well as media, that the features of an image can be highlighted and brought to the forefront for the consumer viewing” or “The colors red, blue, and lavender are those that I identify with the most. I feel they accurately describe my personality. I choose red because I turn red when I get embarrassed …”).
Some candidates even try their hand at poetry — one girl rewrote “’T’was the Night Before Christmas,” editing herself and the advertising company into the story and substituting presents for a job.
The goal of putting the letters online, Killian said, is to show job seekers that, “Hello! This is not a recognizable form of communication!”
Ridicule Not the Point
Recently, Killian went through 100 letters that arrived at his agency from applicants requesting jobs and interviews. Of the 100, not one was without some kind of spelling, grammar or syntax error.
At first, Killian thought that a personal approach was best. When one of the letters came from a senior graduating from a fairly prestigious college and did not contain a single sentence without an error, Killian drafted a “gentle note,” advising the student to get some help with his writing.
What Killian got in response was an angry four-page reply.
“That really set him off,” Killian recalls. “We haven’t done it since. We don’t want to have to change the locks on the building.”
Unfortunately, in the 19 years of the company’s existence, the problem seems to be getting worse, which Killian attributes to changes in technology and everyday communication.
“There are a whole lot of people that can’t speak in an authentic voice,” Killian said. “We’re not a generation that writes a lot. Colleges don’t seem to be very demanding.
“Texting is making it worse. We’re getting printed letters with the letter ‘U’ standing for ‘you.’ And this kid wants to be hired in a communications position!”
While the site started off as just a joke within the company, its popularity has helped Killian find business clients and literary agents find him. A small book is currently being compiled with “Cover Letters from Hell” excerpts the company has collected over the years.
Though the site’s commentary pokes fun at applicants, Killian insists that ridicule is not really the point of the compilation.
“Quite a few [potential applicants] are intimidated from applying, or sending a cover letter at all, but all that they should do is exercise some care,” Killian said.
“I think if people just absorb what’s in there, they’ll at least be able to write clearly and express themselves in a meaningful way.”
Guess they just need to hire a few Americans to answer the phones......Oh the irony!
http://www.management-issues.com/2007/2/27/research/recruiters-slam-british-graduates.asp
Recruiters slam British graduates
Robert Walters, founder of the recruitment company of the same name, has described the lack of ambition and skills of new British graduates as “unbelievable”.
His comments come as his company has published research showing British businesses are crying out for talented recruits in many areas, and increasingly having to look overseas, in part because of a lack of ambition among graduates to go out and make money.
Walters told The Daily Telegraph newspaper: “It’s unbelievable. I’ve been in the recruitment industry for 27 years and I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said.
“There are fewer people doing IT degrees than has been for 15 years,” he said. “No one I know is saying they want to go into law or into accountancy. They just want to sit on a beach and trade on eBay. It’s not just my kids. It’s real and I see it all the time.”
Large, professional services organisations were reporting huge pressure to retain London staff this year, Walters’ company said.
Many firms were will struggling to retain staff who were not happy with their packages, and the number of people expressing dissatisfaction with their overall packages was almost a fifth higher than last year.
Significant premiums were being paid to attract the top talent overseas, especially to Asia.
For example, a finance director earning £250,000 per year in London could be offered between £300,000 and £500,000 per year for a job in the Far East, before taking into account housing and schooling benefits.
Such professional firms were increasingly turning to eastern Europe, South Africa and even South America as try to plug their the skills gap, said the company.
Eastern Europe, in particular, with the accession of countries such as Poland, Hungary and Romania into the European Union, provided good opportunities for recruiting, it added.
India may end up having to outsource to the US. Yeppers! The irony is screaming.
I hear you.
DOH!
The irony ironies itself in post #5
:^)
A fellow who goes to my church has a son that is going to work in India for at least a year. He left not too long ago, I can’t wait to hear how he likes it.
Dam, thats alot of jobs. I guess we pay too much here.
They know the language and culture.
They were educated before the dumbing down of the schools.
They *know* the world doesn't owe them a living and will work hard.
They built most of the systems from which the companies derived their wealth.
But the legions of PC lawyers, the multiculturalists, and the cronyism of the Third World managers won't permit it.
Cheers!
IBM is trying to do 3 things with this.
1) Wage arbitrage with respect to Western workers.
2) Suck all the oxygen out of the room with regards to the other IT services providers.
3) Go where the shills and whores consultants are telling them the greatest growth is going to be.
Try this vanity and the links in it; and also this one.
Need to let my BIL know. He’s an out-of-work IT guy in Cali. Wonder if his wife and child would like India?
And out of that 50,000 you MIGHT find 5-6 that you can actually understand. They will all claim they speak English. well, they passably can read English but they can never get rid of that accent that is so thick they are unintelligible.
And if you can't understand them they are useless.
They've heard the stories about how IT people get treated. I don't blame them.
If a job requires five, a company will hire two. It's the age old problem of how to find enough slaves.
They didn't think that maybe the talented people they were seeing, were able to come here because they were the top fraction of a percent of the Indian population. They also did not take into account that, as India grows more prosperous, some of that talented top percent will be drawn to satisfying INDIA'S needs for doctors, lawyers, managers, etc, leaving less for outsourcing companies to exploit
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