Land of Rising Sun warms to Indian IT pros

If the infotech companies in the country are looking at markets other than United States to mitigate the geo-political uncertainties, it's time for career aspirants too to look at pastures other than the dollar market.

Consider this, the Japanese IT market, the second largest market after the US, is attracting just about 1,300 people per annum from India, while more than 50,000 people fly over to US to pursue their career ambitions.

"There are three major reasons, why Japan could not attract as many people as the US or the British markets do. These include the complexity of Japanese language, local business rules and the cultural transit," Kenji Ohashi, the chief executive officer and director of i-POC, a Japanese consultancy company, said.

i-POC stands for Indian IT engineer Placement and Offshore Development Company. It is a two-year-old joint venture set up by two Japanese IT majors - NTC and C-Cube.  Based at Gifu Prefecture, the company is currently executing projects for majors like NTT, Fujitsu, Toyota and Hitachi.

It clocked a revenue of $ 2 million last year and eyes $ 8 million this year.

Currently, there are about 6,50,000 IT professionals in Japan and the industry faces a shortfall of 3 lakh (300,000) professionals.

"We find that the Indian IT professionals are the best in the world and hence we are focusing on only Indian market for our HR requirements," Ohashi said.

"We are not a body shopping company and our focus in on the offshore talent in the country," he clarified.

i-POC has so far recruited about 50 professionals from Pune and started sourcing from Hyderabad.

It first recruits people and then  trains them in Japanese proficiency, business law and cultural practices. It had flown in seven Japanese faculty members to train IT professionals.

It  recently recruited 35 people and is targeting to recruit about 150 professionals this year.