China and India part 2
Last few weeks I was in China and India for business, here is my recent blog:
Last week, I spent several days in K-Park, an industrial park in Wuxi, China. There are many beautiful buildings located next to Tai lake (Thai Ho) with nice lawns and many trees just planted few months ago. The classroom was modern with many young engineers. They are China's best graduates that allow them to get jobs in this high-tech industry, the most prestigious jobs in China today. They do not come to learn software engineering or computer science but English. The instructor reminded them: “English only, anyone saying something else will be punished”. The class laughed as I was introduced to them. Nearly three decades of efforts to become the “Manufacturing center for the world” China discovered the benefit of information technology. For the past 25 years, China's information technology was only consumed domestically to support manufactures and telecommunication industries with minimum effort to look elsewhere when India moved up and took over the lucrative outsourcing business. Today due to the financial crisis and other issues about declining exports, pollution, toxic wastes etc. the government begin to shut down many manufactures, move them to other countries, and start a new clean industry: Information technology, especially software for outsourcing.
However, China has a problem: It does not have enough highly skilled software workers despite the fact that China graduates over 400,000 new engineers every year but only a few are actually could do the work because the education systems are not adequate for global works and need improvement. One professor told me: “We are still using the traditional rote memorization in classes and in the exams, our students can recite almost everything but they can not apply to real works required by the global software industry. Our university curricula are focusing mostly in theories rather than practices. Even students from the best schools are fed-up with “cram courses” and graduate without the basic skills. That is why we are improving it now so few years from now we could catch up with others”. I asked him: “How long do you think it would take?” He smiled: “Maybe five years, maybe ten years but it does not matter. Time is not important as long as we are making progress toward our goal. Thirty years ago, we start the manufacturing effort and today we are the manufacturing center of the world. Maybe twenty year from now we will be the information technology center of the world”.
Even before the government's technology education improvement initiative, China's high-tech companies already began to staff up their people to prepare for the move into outsourcing business. One software company CEO told me: "The problem is not a shortage of people, but a shortage of highly skilled software people. From the outside, this country with over 1 billion people may appear to have an unlimited supply of workers but the transition from labor to knowledge workers require significant investment in education. I am very glad that our government realizes it now and takes a very strong approach to improve the information technology education programs”.
Despite the financial crisis, demand for knowledge workers in Information Technology area is still high, even India is not able to keep up. According to the National Association of Software Services Companies of India (NASSCOM), India has a potential shortfall of 500,000 technology professionals by 2010. Actually, it is a problem of success. The outsourcing industry is expanding so fast that the population can't keep up with the demand for high-skilled workers. Tata Consultancy Services, India's largest software company, hires around 3,000 people a month. Infosys, the second largest plans to hire 2,000 people a month. Accenture plans to hire 8,000 in the next six months and IBM will need more than 50,000 additional people in India by 2010. A shortage means something India companies do not want to see: Higher wages. India's success is based on the fact that its programmers work for less than those in developed countries such as the U.S and Europe. If India's industry can't find enough workers to keep wages low, India may not be able to compete with China or other countries like Vietnam, Malaysia or Philippines and the entire software industry could stumble.
Of course, to make sure that they will have enough workers, many India's companies started their own training centers rather than depending on their own universities. The Mysore campus of Infosys is an example. Last month, I visited this training center and was very impressed with the facilities. The training center has over 120 faculty members, more than 80 buildings with 2,350 rooms and even a movie complex for their students. It already had 4,500 students enrolled in the 16-week course for new employees but it is planned for 15,000 students in the near future. There is a soccer field, a cricket field, a swimming pool, a bowling alley and a large gym. An Infosys manager told me: “We are planning for several training centers like this in other cities so we will have enough workers to meet global demand”. Another training facility that I visited was IBM's training center that could accommodate 10,000 workers so it seems India will remain very competitive.
However Kiran Karnik, the NASSCOM chairman told me: "Even with several training centers like these, we still have actual shortage of skilled people. Much of the problem is rooted in a deeply flawed education system that can not be improved in a short time. As our economy booming in the past 10 years, more families push their children into information technology. The number of student has nearly tripled but the problems have simply grown worse because India has many universities that seldom have enough electricity, several days a week, classrooms have to shut down because no electricity, no computers. There are many universities where professors do not show up because they are busy opening up special courses at homes for tutoring students. We do not have enough qualified professors to meet the high demand of the industry and do not pay them enough so many have to earn additional money by having their own private tutoring courses. Most Textbooks are old and expensive so many students have to share books which are not very productive. Even the best schools such as Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) with top-level professors also have problems. The competition to get into this university means students must spend at least a year or more in special private tutoring to pass the entrance exams, so instruction is strictly focus on rote learning to have high test scores. The focus is on cram and crams a lot of things without the capacity to think or to get along with people. The result is our well-educated software people always have problem to work on team because they are taught to compete with each others at all cost”.
It is obviously that both China and India are preparing for their future in information technology industry. Today they are focusing in provide skilled workers for the outsourcing business but this is only short term because when their education systems improve, they will not stop there but will move into better position of leading the software industry. I have no doubt that someday there will be a “Microsoft” or “Google” of China or India and it is possible that people will use software created in China or India.
As I sat on the airplane, I was thinking about the key factor of the 21st century which is “speed”. Yes, everything is happening at the speed of the internet and if you do not move fast, you will be left behind. My last vivid image of China and India is a picture of row after row of students sat quietly in classrooms, waiting to be taught.
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
