About a month back I was watching the ‘walk-the-talk’ program in NDTV in which Mr.S.Ramadorai, CEO of TCS appeared. He gave the real statistics of the ‘skill-shortage’ problem and the excerpt goes as follows:
Shekhar Gupta: You employ 60,000 people already, most of them well-educated, technical people. Do you have concerns over where more of these people will come from? Are you beginning to see a problem there?
Mr.Ramadorai: I definitely have some worries on this. The reason I’m saying that is, if you’re producing six and a half lakhs of engineering graduates and almost 10 million science graduates in the country, how many of them are really suitable for high-tech jobs? That is the fundamental question. The 6.5 lakhs translates into a suitability pool of about 2 lakhs and then the 10 million comes down to about 1.8 million suitable people.
Apart from the above mentioned example, there is loads of media coverage on this latest ‘talent-crunch’ buzzword, what is being ‘done’ to address this problem? At one end bunch of fresh engineers are waiting in the queue to get jobs and at another end companies like TCS are feeling ‘pinch’ because of the talent crunch. Even though Indian IT companies are spending as much as 2000 US dollars (Roughly about one lakh) per fresh engineer to train them, it is proving out to be a costly affair. According to me it is more of a ‘reactive’ approach.
Recently I came across this company Emertxe (http://www.emertxe.com/) who have taken a ‘proactive’ approach to address ‘industry-academia’ gap. Basically this company is promoted by some of my friends and they are into Embedded Systems trainings and product development. They offer a five months training program ‘Embedded systems and systems programming’ in which they train people on practical approach towards systems programming. Their real ‘value-add’ comes from the fact that all of their faculties are working in various MNCs in Bangalore. I would say it’s really a ‘welcome’ move and they have taken a ‘real step’ towards bridging the industry-academia gap. I also came to know that this program can be taken by experienced professionals who want to shift to Embedded Systems domain.
Companies like Emertxe are really playing the ‘bridging’ part in the IT industry by really ‘doing’ things rather than talking. I am sure it will create a real ‘long term value addition’ as far as Indian tech industry is concerned.
