India's IT Problems part 2
According to India's industry report, about more than half of the Information Technology (IT) graduates from India' universities will have to take jobs well below their degree qualifications and about a third of them will NOT be able to get jobs even there is a critical shortage of skilled workers there. The reason is in the past few years, India had so many universities offering all types of degree but without any real practical skills to meet the demand of the market. The report reveals that currently India produces about 1.5 million software developers each year, which is more than the U.S, and China combined but most of them have no skills to work in the IT industry. According to the report in 1998, there were 1,300 universities across India, graduating over 200,000 software developers a year. As demand increases, especially in the $120 Billion dollars outsourcing market, thousands of new universities were created, most were formerly two years colleges, vocational schools, or training centers transformed into universities for the purpose of making money. Even without skilled professors and proper curricula they still captured the education market and issued degrees indiscriminately. Since then the number of college graduates have double and triple in anticipate of meeting the high demand of the industry. The shift from quality to quantitive has created a major problem for young Indians who dream to work in the IT industry with a belief that by having a degree will allow them to get good jobs. In 2007, the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) has warned about the lack of quality training and the oversupply of “degreed but unskilled workers” but the trend continued resulting in a high number of university graduates without jobs.
A senior IT executive explains: “Ten years ago, if you can code and test you have a job but today the demand has changed. Customers are asking for different skills such as mobile, cloud computing and system integration so what million of college graduates learned in school are suddenly obsolete. For graduates who learn from good universities, they can be retrained because they already have good foundation. Unfortunately most companies do not want to provide training anymore because after training most of them would switch job to get better salary. For graduates who learn from “For profit but poorly train” universities, they are not even learn the basic concept but only tricks and short cuts just to get the degree so there is no hope for them. They will never be able to do anything with their worthless degrees. Today software is getting bigger, more complex, and requires different skills, even top university's training has not be able to catch up. The crisis is getting critical as the number of unemployed graduates have reached several millions. Many are frustrated and turn into crime; newspapers are full of reports about college graduates involve in theft, robbery, selling or using illegal drugs.
An industry analyst laments: “Hiring is slowing down because customers are changing their needs so a degree in computer or engineering are no longer guarantee for jobs. With globalization, Indian graduates have to compete with graduates from other countries such as China, Russia, Eastern Europe and even African countries. Today most companies do not care what degree that you have or what you know, they only focus on what you can do with that knowledge.” Among hundreds of new universities that have been established in the past six or eight years, about a third of them are closed; many remaining are on the verge of file for bankruptcy. An investor laments: “Perhaps these schools worth more for the land they situate on than the school that they built. Investment in education for profit is like the stock market. It goes up then it crashes and you lose everything.” A parent complains: “How could government allow people to cheat and gamble with the future of our children without any oversight or monitor?” Many graduates are now very angry, desperate, hopeless and the social aspect of this massive unemployment may soon explode.
Currently the global economic slowdown due to the impact of European economic downturn could have worsened what is already a bad problem where a third of the IT business is depending on the European market. Even with the economic recovery in the U.S. many Indian's IT businesses are slowing down due to the “Insourcing” trend and the change in immigration laws. Instead of outsourcing, many U.S. companies would rather hire top students and have they come to work in the U.S instead.
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
