Software industry in India
During my visit in India, Dr. Prasad a professor of software engineering shared with me a survey he did last month. According to the survey, the global financial recession has opened more opportunities for Indian software engineers than ever before. The survey results have shown that there are some problems within the industry regarding the retaining of workers and how to attract the best talent but the most surprising finding was that over 70% of respondents said that they were considering working abroad in search of better salaries and opportunity. The reason is many Indian software workers believe that they could go to the U.S or Europe and make ten times more than their current salaries so many are searching for opportunities abroad than in their country. Even those continue to work in India seemed predominantly uncomfortable with their current salaries. More than 90 % admitting that they are either actively seeking jobs with another companies or at least keeping an eye on the job market. In addition, a significant proportion of respondents (over 35%) said that they were considering working for themselves as consultants rather than making some “big bosses” getting richer. In the survey of the richest people in India, seven out of ten came from the software industry.
What this survey found is there is an increasing pressure to making more money because there are more demands in the market. However workers are feeling the pressure and getting angrier. The success of India software industry is that they can do more works for much less so the U.S and Europe are outsourced a lot of works to them to reduce costs in this financial crisis time. As a result, India has faced major skills shortages within the industry so losing people is a situation many companies cannot afford, so some begin to raise the salaries. This creates “salary war” among companies and triggers high turnover of worker, as high as 35% annually. Due to the high demand, government also put a lot of pressure to state universities to produce more software people to meet the demand and this also creates another problem of having “unqualified workers”.
The government plan is to increases its technology workforce to 100 million people by the year 2020. According to this plan, India will have a young and vigorous work force that could be accounted for half of the total technical workforce in the world or one for every two people working in technology would be Indian. By having this kind of workforce, India will become the world's most talent providers with a third of its economy will be based on high technology. Dr. Kapil Sibal, India's education minister have an ambitious plan of massively invest in high technology education including biomedical, biotechnology, advanced software and hardware research so it can achieve a 10% growth rate each year for the next ten years. Last week, in a press conference, he reported that India today has 220 million children go to school but only 12% of them make it to college (compared to 68% in the US and 74% in China). Similarly, out of the roughly 510 million workers currently employed in India, only 12% are skilled in technology. And even the "skilled workers" still lack the practical skills that would make them attractive to work outside of India, and he wants to change that.
NASSCOM, the Indian IT industry's trade association just releases a report that 75% of the engineering graduates are “unemployable” because they do not have the “Practical skills” to work in industry. So to continue a 10% growth rate as the plan indicated India must dramatically improve both the quantity and quality of its skilled worker. But there were disagreements among educators on the means to achieve that goal. For many decades, educational achievement was measured by degree, preferably a college degree or above. But employers in the emerging software industry are seeking workers with practical skills not full of theoretical knowledge. There is disagreement between academia and industry on what students need to learn. Most public educational institutions in India have attempted to achieve "economies of scale" by producing as many students as possible using a “rigidly-defined curriculum” that couldn't be adjusted to accommodate the industry's needs. So the debate is still on going.
Dr Prassad told me: “They have been debating about this for the last twenty years, nothing change. I am afraid when Indian is debating, other countries are progressing. It is possible that China, Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia could overtake us soon if their people can speak English well. Many Indians do not know that their key advantage is that they have the English language, India's education system is not better than China or Malaysia so if they have language training and improving their education systems faster, no one know what will happen. In globalization, things happen very fast and the market can change quickly if developed countries find another place that has better education system, better skilled workers, at lower prices, thing could change very fast.
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
