India’s tech sector seeks trained workers

MYSORE, India – At the heart of a 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.”

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.

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.