Indian Oursourcing Industry Facing Shortage of Skilled Workers

Industry experts at the meeting of Nasscom, India’s outsourcing alliance, said on Thursday that skills shortage was the biggest threat to the outsourcing industry’s blazing growth.

From ground zero I am observing several interesting effects of this shortage. For example one lady worked for us as a trainee. I was forced to let her go for serious lack of performance even as a trainee. I have been informed that she was hired by Infosys as well as IBM. It appears they are being forced to hire indiscriminately without much regard for quality. They just need warm bodies/headcount to bag new contracts.

Recently there was a newspaper article where outsourcing companies announced hiring B.Sc. students en-masse and train them. Companies like Infosys and Wipro have large training centers to compensate for lack of industry experince of the freshers.

These are sure signs of desperation in my book. I had seen the same thing at Silicon Valley in US during the dotcom era where even incompetent people were hired at exhorbitant prices.

Outsourcing industry at 23 billion dollars accounts for most of the country’s software and services industry. It accounts for 5% of GDP and employs 1.2 million workers and growing over 30% per year (data from NYT).

If it was upto me I would rather slow down the rate of growth than affect the quality of software developed.