Best Indian cities to get a job

The Indian job market is hot, with employers raising wages to attract top talent. Wipro is even training its own engineers, because of a shortage of qualified graduates. But some regions are doing better than others, according to Manpower, a global staffing firm, which surveys employers every quarter about their hiring intentions.

According to Manpower, Indian job seekers should head west, especially to Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Bharuch, Gandhinagar, Indore, Pune, Rajkot and Vadodara.

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Manpower derives its employment outlook by taking the percentage of employers expecting to add jobs and subtracting those planning to cut. In India, the "net employment outlook" is a healthy 39 per cent for the first quarter of 2007. That's one of the best outlooks in Asia, and far ahead of China's 18 per cent.

One things is clear: India isn't just about IT anymore. The mining and construction industries, in fact, are expecting to add more jobs than any other sector, as the government steps up spending on roads and airports. "The government has woken up to the need for making India's infrastructure world-class," says Soumen Basu, the head of Manpower's India division.

There was a lot of good news for the country this year. Since India is highly dependent on oil imports, the conventional wisdom has been that the country's job market would suffer from high energy costs. Instead, the wide swings in oil prices this year didn't hurt employment, Basu says.

But reports of India's success mask a vast diversity among regions. Employment expectations are strongest in the west. The employment outlook in that region is 43 per cent, an improvement over last year, when the outlook was 18 per cent.

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The west is usually on top, says Basu. Last year's downturn was largely due to floods in the third quarter of 2005. Similar to those in New Orleans, the natural disasters caused severe damage and created a period of uncertainty in India's financial capital. "Mumbai was really limping back to normalcy," Basu says.

Of course, different regions are better for different jobs. Western cities, particularly Mumbai and Pune, are traditionally the stronghold for financial and manufacturing careers. Information technology jobs, however, are concentrated in the south, which has a strong employment outlook as well. The southern cities of Bangalore and Hyderabad are still the best places for jobs in IT.

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If you're looking for a job in business process outsourcing, also known as IT enabled services, Bangalore is still one place to be. But you can travel north, as well. Delhi, and its suburb Gurgaon, are also hot spots for BPO jobs. Genpact, which is part-owned by General Electric, employs 18,000 people in Gurgaon, according to Basu.

American Express and ABN AMRO have operations there as well. The net employment outlook in the north is 40 per cent, an increase of eight percentage points over a year ago.

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Eastern India, meanwhile, is still struggling. The employment outlook for the east--including Kolkata, Bhuwaneshwar, Cuttak, Guwhati and Patna--is 28 per cent for the first quarter of 2007, down nine percentage points from last year's number. The investment in infrastructure isn't as strong there, Basu says.

And the communist state of Bengal is struggling to meet the economic growth of the country as a whole. "They've been trying to do a China here," Basu says. But, he adds, "The east is always behind, and I do see that trend continuing."

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