NASSCOM strategy to meet
shortage of manpower by 2010
Building A National ITES-BPO Cadre
By Dev Varam

The explosive growth of the Indian ITES-BPO industry in recent years has generated in its wake an unprecedented demand for knowledge workers. As of now, the supply of workforce has just about matched the pace of this industry's growth. But a severe shortage of manpower is building up on the horizon, the impact of which will be felt by the industry in not so distant a future, say by 2010. The solution lies in a multi-pronged drive involving educational institutions ranging from schools to colleges to universities, government agencies, industry associations to solve the manpower problem. If corrective measures are not initiated and implemented in the next few years India is bound to tumble downwards from its pre-eminent position as an established leader in the global ITES-BPO industry.

The National Association of Software Companies (NASSCOM), the apex organization of the IT industry, has realized the gravity of the situation and has planned to build up a national ITES-BPO cadre right at the education institutional level and create necessary infrastructure to train it to meet the growing quality standards of the industry. The organization has worked out the NASSCOM Assessment of Competence (NAC) test, which would be conducted country-wide to develop the ITES-BPO cadre. NASSCOM has rightly chosen Jaipur and Ajmer as centers for the maiden NAC test in a bid to develop the second and third tier cities as the potential growth pockets of the ITES-BPO industry. The NAC test will be conducted on November 18 to select the trainable and employable workforce out of an expected 2,000 candidates. The launch of this national roll-out comes after the successful completion of a pilot project through which 6,000 candidates were tested in August 2005.
While the problem is severe, India's demographics clearly weigh in industry's favour. The available workforce is young and fresh from educational institutions. But the bulk of this manpower, though qualified academically, is not in a position to meet the industry's demanding quality requirements. In this scenario, only the Industry-Academia partnerships are expected to bridge the demand-supply gap.
Over the last decade or so, India has established itself as the leading offshore destination for ITES and BPO services. The Indian ITES-BPO industry has been growing at an annual rate of more than 25 percent. It is gearing up to generate export revenues amounting to $60 billion by 2010.
The single most important feature of India's strength has been its manpower, which will be required in abundance in order to achieve the targeted export revenues in a short span of time. Today, according to estimates, India contributes around 28 per cent of the global pool of knowledge workers. At its projected growth, the Indian ITES-BPO industry is expected to face a shortage of 500,000 knowledge workers by 2010. It would be a grave situation if not tackled in time.
The organizations are working against time to solve the problem of impending manpower shortage, in view of the tremendous job potential that the ITES-BPO industry holds. The NASSCOM-McKinsey report envisages that the IT/BPO sector will create 1.6 million knowledge professionals and give indirect employment to another 6.5 million people by 2010. The IT services sector will require 150,000 employees while the BPO sector will require 350,000 trained personnel.
The numbers is not a problem, but it is their quality, which is not up to the mark. How to turn the demographics In India's favour, is the issue. According to the NASSCOM-McKinsey Report, 2005, the industry is currently using a multi-pronged approach to address the shortage of skilled manpower, by hiring specialist expatriates and recruiting freshers and training them and initiating close interaction with academia.
Analysts believe that the problem of skilled workers' shortage could be resolved by creating knowledge zones. For this, India will need to develop 10-12 integrated knowledge cities in the next five years to tackle problems of infrastructure in order to match targets.
NASSCOM's IT Workforce Development programme initiated in early 2004, endeavours to bridge the gap in demand and supply of knowledge workers by encouraging Industry-Academia partnerships. It has already conducted several industry-specific training programmes across the country.
For instance, Bannari Amman Institute of Technology (BAIT), located about 80 km away from the southern Indian industrial city of Coimbatore, invited faculty members of 40-50 engineering colleges in the region to its campus, to undergo faculty training programs conducted by Sun Microsystems. About 150 faculty members were trained in this programme. NASSCOM has run 15 such programmes across India, primarily in Tier II colleges, and has trained close to 500 faculty members to date.
Industry sources point out that NASSCOM's approach in meeting the demand for skilled manpower is welcome. However, its Faculty Development Programme requires improvement. The programme is restricted to theory and does not make a provision for the faculty to have a stint in an actual software development scenario.
According to Kiran Karnik, President, NASSCOM, the process of actively working with individual companies and the industry has been set in place though it is not estimated as to how many trained professionals will be trained in the next few years. Karnik says that NASSCOM is focusing on training students and faculty members of Tier II colleges and universities as well as students from tier II cities like Lucknow, Guwahati and Bhubaneshwar, who are currently a neglected lot.
The ITES-BPO industry is equally concerned. Many individual companies in the two sectors are proactively tying up with academic institutions to meet their ever-growing manpower requirements. In this context, it is worth mentioning the Hewlett-Packard's (HP) alliance with Jadavpur University. They have collaborated to facilitate mutual exchange of knowledge in mobile computing. Under this tie-up, HP will share industry knowledge on relevant IT innovations and foster talent in the form of grants and fellowships. In addition, it will install leading server technologies and provide IT infrastructure support for the computing lab. Together, the will work on WiFi systems, mobility solutions, distance education, cellular networks and satellite communications. Both students and faculty of the university will be encouraged to conduct research at the HP labs facility located in Bangalore.
Another example is Cisco, the networking major. It has set up more than 130 Networking Academies across 20 states and union territories in the country, which have more than 6,000 active students. Banasthali Vidyapeeth, Anna University, IIIT Hyderabad and Bangalore, Thiagaraj College of Engineering and Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University are some of the colleges they have tied up with.
The flagship course - CCNA (Cisco Certified Networking Associate) trains students, government employees and in-transition workers to design, build and maintain complex computer networks. It incorporates an E-Learning system that includes multimedia curricula, online testing, performance-based skills assessment and classroom management through a Web interface.
TIBCO Software Inc and the International Institute of Information Technology, Pune has also announced an academic partnership recently. TIBCO will provide the Institute with its business integration software at no charge, to ensure the necessary skills, training and knowledge transfer.
In addition to collaborating with academia, the ITES-BPO industry is also making forays into other countries to hire expatriate talent with a minimum experience of one or two years. For instance, Vietnam has very bright programming talent, Sri Lanka and Philippines provide good options too coming up with extremely creative strategies to grapple with the manpower problem.
ITES-BPO companies have been approaching colleges - IITs, NITs and other institutions making offers, starting with third year students. The companies will interact with the students regularly till they finish their course.
While the ITES-BPO Industry is going all out to train professionals and university graduates, there seems to be a dearth of Human Resources (HR) talent that is specific to tackle the manpower needs of the IT sector. The HR professionals available today are not particularly geared to understand the needs of the ITES-BPO sector.
Some companies such as Accenture are taking initiative to address this issue. It has entered into a tie-up with XLRI, a reputed management institute to launch the Accenture & XLRI-HR Academy. The academy is expected to cater to the HR needs of the growing ITES-BPO needs.
Similarly, Zensar has forged an alliance with Symbiosis under which it has hired 180 students, teaching them the IT elements in a two-year programme, Symbiosis on its part focuses on teaching them the management part of the curriculum.