IT firms brace to face skilled manpower shortage

The threat of skilled manpower shortage looming over the IT and ITeS sectors has not taken the industry by surprise even though it comes at a time when the sector is looking at ramping up of headcount.

The industry has safety catches and contingency measures in place, including hiring of expatriate talent, recruiting freshers and training them, and a closer interaction between academia and industry among others.

A recent Nasscom-McKinsey report predicted a shortfall of 500,000 knowledge workers by 2010, mainly due to lack of suitable talent.

"On a mass level there is an availability of abundant skilled workforce and this is increasing. Exposure to foreign movies and gadgets like i-pods among the young is making them proficient in handling English language, an important skill for BPO industry," Intelenet CEO Susir Kumar told Business Standard.

The company used to recruit over 70 per cent of experienced hands, with the remaining 30 per cent being freshers. The freshers would be trained to meet the company's skill levels. Intelenet is ramping up its headcount to 20,000 full-time employees from the present 5,000 by 2009 and the addition of staff is on track.

According to Mauj Telecom COO Arun Gupta, "the mobile content and gaming industry has always faced a dearth of trained manpower with domain experience. We have been scaling our training programmes to fulfil our needs and hiring expatriate talent for middle management."

Mauj Telecom, a telecom value-added service company, presently employs 110 personnel and plans to double it in the next 6-8 months.

Networking, software and internet major Helios & Matheson employs over 1,200 people and despite the reports of shortage of manpower doing the rounds, it plans to grow to 2,000 employees by financial year 2007.

"The main way to address this problem is to have a closer interaction between academia and industry.   We believe that 'Campus Connect' programmes are the solution," Helios & Matheson IT CEO G K Muralikrishna said.

Pune-based Compulink Systems is set to ramp up its headcount by an additional 170 people, taking its total number of employees to 350 by the end of 2006.